Photo: Monica Schipper/Getty Images

Hamdan Ballal, Palestinian co-director of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, has been freed after being detained by Israeli authorities in the occupied West Bank yesterday, his co-director Yuval Abraham said on X. According to testimony from their other co-director Basel Adra and activists from the Center for Jewish Nonviolence on the scene, dozens of Israeli settlers — some masked and armed with knives and guns — descended on his home village of Susya right as residents were breaking their Ramadan fasts, threw stones at Ballal’s house, and beat him. Abraham said on Monday that Ballal had been abducted from an ambulance by Israeli authorities, his whereabouts unknown for several hours. After reportedly being held overnight at a detention center in the settlement of Kiryat Arba, he was released on Tuesday and is returning home to his family.

Commenting on the incident, the Israel Defense Forces told press that “several terrorists” had thrown rocks at Israeli citizens, leading to “mutual rock-hurling between Palestinians and Israelis at the scene.” The IDF also claimed four civilians — three of them Palestinian and one Israeli — were then held for questioning. Ballal himself told the Associated Press that he was blindfolded for 24 hours and slept under a freezing air conditioner. “All my body is pain,” he said. “I heard the voices of the soldiers, they were laughing about me … I heard ‘Oscar,’ but I didn’t speak Hebrew.” (He also claimed in an earlier statement to his lawyer reviewed by the AP that one of his attackers was a well-known settler who’d threatened him in the past.)

Filmed between 2019 and 2023, No Other Land chronicled the violent eviction of Palestinians from the village of Masafer Yatta by Israeli forces. It was directed by four filmmakers, two Palestinian (Ballal and Adra) and Israeli (Abraham and Rachel Szor). Though the film has struggled to find distribution, it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film earlier this month — hence, presumably, the “Oscar” comment Ballal says he overheard. The filmmakers say all that visibility has put a target on their backs. “We came back from the Oscars and every day since there is an attack on us,” Adra told the Associated Press. “This might be their revenge on us for making the movie. It feels like a punishment.”

Following Ballal’s detention, members of the international film community circulated an online petition calling for his immediate release. It amassed over 8,000 signatures. “Every filmmaker and Academy member should be acting together in protest,” actor Mark Ruffalo commented on an Instagram post about the news. “This is an international incident and a violation of human rights.”