(LifeSiteNews) — After his winning an Academy Award for a documentary film on the illegal Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, Palestinian director Hamdan Ballal was attacked by what his colleague described as a “lynch mob” of masked Israeli “settlers” last week at his home in the besieged region.

Following what was described as a “horrific” assault, the Israeli military personnel who were present denied Ballal medical attention from an ambulance transport which arrived at the scene and instead arrested him, taking him into custody, with two others, for reasons which were unclear.

Ballal is one of four directors of the film No Other Land which won an Oscar for best documentary feature in early March despite its being banned by every U.S. distributor. The joint Israeli-Palestinian production chronicles the events in Masafer Yatta in the West Bank where Israeli authorities have ordered the expulsion of residents and thus executed the destruction of homes, schools, water wells, and roads to facilitate these ends.

Basel Adra, a fellow Palestinian and co-director of the film, suggested this particular attack may be a response to the international acclaim received by the documentary.

“Palestinians in the village have been under physical attack by settlers almost daily. The settlers’ violence is increasing here. Maybe it’s a revenge for the movie and the Oscar,” he said.

Calling the violence of these Israeli settlers on the Palestinians in their internationally recognized territory “horrific,” he testified that there were “dozens of settlers together with the Israeli soldiers and they were threatening us with weapons.”

“The police were there from the beginning and did not intervene. While the soldiers were pointing their weapons at us, the settlers started attacking the houses of the Palestinians.

“Hamdan tried to protect his family and the settlers attacked him. Soldiers started shooting in the air to prevent anyone to help Hamdan. He was shouting for help. They let the settlers attack him and then the army abducted him.”

Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham, posted on X: “A group of settlers just lynched Hamdan Ballal, co-director of our film no other land. They beat him and he has injuries in his head and stomach, bleeding. Soldiers invaded the ambulance he called, and took him.”

The group of armed KKK-like masked settlers that lynched No Other Land director Hamdan Ballal (still missing), caught here on camera. pic.twitter.com/kFGFxSEanY

— Yuval Abraham יובל אברהם (@yuval_abraham) March 24, 2025

After being blindfolded, “handcuffed all night and beaten in a military base,” Abraham announced Ballai was being released 20 hours after being detained.

In subsequent interviews Ballai said he thought the Israeli settlers, who kicked his head “like a football,” would actually kill him.

“I realized they were attacking me specifically,” Ballal said while at a West Bank hospital following his release. Though he does not speak Hebrew, he conveyed that “when they say ‘Oscar,’ you understand, (and) when they say your name, you understand.”

Religious Zionist settler violence common in Israeli occupied West Bank

By no means is such violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers a rare occurrence on the West Bank. During the calendar year of 2024, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) logged about 1,420 incidents of Israeli settler violence. “These incidents include settlers reportedly killing five Palestinians, including a child, and injuring 360 other Palestinians, including 35 children, and vandalising more than 26,100 Palestinian-owned trees.”

by the way, today another attack happened in masafer yatta. the victim, qussai, 17, isn’t an oscar winner, so people won’t hear about it, but here’s the video of masked settlers beating him with metal rods as his mom screams in the background, just in case pic.twitter.com/7Wh16Ugg7J

— Yuval Abraham יובל אברהם (@yuval_abraham) March 28, 2025

Amnesty International had described these attacks as “part of a decades long state-backed campaign to dispossess, displace and oppress Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, under Israel’s system of apartheid.”

“Israeli forces have a track record of enabling settler violence and it is outrageous that once again Israeli forces stood by and in some cases took part in these brutal attacks,” states an April 2024 report.

Colonial ‘settlers’ espouse ideology of Jewish supremacy, ethnic cleansing, building of third Temple

Jewish “settlers” in the West Bank are most often associated with the influential international heresy of religious Zionism which embraces an ideology of radical Jewish supremacy and thus a justification for the horrendous violent crimes of ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinian people as a means of taking over the Holy Land and building an exclusive Jewish ethno-state.

READ: Israeli extremist rabbis instruct soldiers heading to Gaza: ‘Kill all their children’

With the takeover of the land complete they aim to build a third temple for animal sacrifice in Jerusalem and welcome their Moshiach (Messiah) of whom their expectations share a close alignment with what Catholic authorities expect from the Antichrist. And from Jerusalem, these religious Zionists anticipate this figure to subject all other peoples under Noahide Laws, vanquishing Christianity as “idolatry,” and even executing the death penalty against Christians for this supposed crime.

The illegal settler communities also enjoy indirect financial support from billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars which support Israel’s military forces and thus serve to assist settlers and settlements to effectively expand in the West Bank. Private American interests also provide significant funds to further develop illegal settlements, paramilitary groups and IDF units which operate in Gaza and the West Bank as well.

Oscar-winners join voices of Catholic bishops and world governments in demanding end to Israeli occupation, ethnic cleansing of Palestinians

In memorable statements made at the Academy Awards in early March, Adra shared the experience of constant fear Palestinians like him face “every day under the Israeli occupation.”

“No Other Land” director Basel Adra: “We call on the world to take serious actions to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.” | #Oscars pic.twitter.com/NzoqLKiBSJ

— Variety (@Variety) March 3, 2025

“No Other Land reflects the harsh reality that we have been enduring for decades and still resist as we call on the world to take serious actions to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people,” he said.

Following this up, Israeli co-producer Yuval Abraham exclaimed, “There is a different path, a political solution without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of our people. And I have to say as I am here (in the United States), the foreign policy in this country is helping to block this path.”

In July of last year the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s 57-year military occupation of internationally recognized Palestinian territory was illegal under international law. The United Nations General Assembly followed-up on this ruling in September overwhelmingly passing a resolution demanding Israel end its illegal occupation of these territories, including the evacuation of their settlements on the West Bank, within 12 months.

The unanimous and constant voices of the Catholic and Orthodox bishops in the region have characterized Israel’s illegal occupation of these Palestinian territories as the “root” aggression of the conflict, an ongoing “sin,” that must be resisted and remedied should there be any hope of peace in the region.

READ: How do Christians in the Holy Land understand the Israeli occupation of Palestine?

Though the production of No Other Land was completed before October 2023, it has been released in the midst of overwhelming Israeli attacks upon the Gaza Strip. These include a starvation blockade and the dropping of enough tonnage of bombs to surpass 5 of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For these reasons many have judged Israel to be guilty of the crime of genocide.

READ: On Holocaust Memorial Day, Jewish group protests Israel’s ‘sadistic’ genocide in Gaza

Trump ‘fully supports’ Israeli genocidal bombing and starvation campaign against Gaza civilians

The White House of U.S. President Donald Trump has affirmed his full support for the Israeli-imposed starvation blockade on the two million Palestinians in Gaza which began on March 2. This population includes one million children.

Large-scale genocidal bombing of these mostly displaced civilians was initiated on March 18 with what one Israeli newspaper called Israel’s “largest child massacre in its history.

Since breaking the ceasefire agreement for which Trump took credit in mid-January, the Israelis have directly killed over 1,000 Palestinians of which at least 322 are confirmed to be children. Since October 2023 reliable reports of deaths include 50,357 with the conservative possibility that indirect deaths from the conflict number in the hundreds of thousands.

In the short span of Trump’s current term, he has signed off on over $12 billion in new military aid for Israel and emboldened the religious Zionists who have taken power in that government by repeatedly calling for the expelling of the Palestinians from the land of their forefathers.

READ: Bishop Strickland publishes open letter to Trump on war in the Middle East

Though No Other Land has been successfully distributed in more than 20 countries, likely due to political motivations, the US is not one of them. However, the producers were able to self-distribute the film in selected American venues. For more information see the movie’s website.

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