Oscar-winning Palestinian director says Israeli soldiers beat him after attack by settlers

HEBRON, West Bank (AP) — Only a few weeks ago, Hamdan Ballal stood on a stage in Los Angeles accepting an Oscar for the film “No Other Land,” a documentary depicting his West Bank village’s struggle against Israel’s occupation.

On Tuesday, Ballal – his face bruised and clothes still spotted with blood – recounted to The Associated Press how he was heavily beaten by an Israeli settler and soldiers the night before. The settler, he said, kicked his head “like a football” during a settler attack on his village.

The soldiers then detained him and two other Palestinians. Ballal said he was kept blindfolded for more than 20 hours, sitting on the floor under a blasting air conditioner. The soldiers kicked, punched or hit him with a stick whenever they came on their guard shifts, he said. Ballal doesn’t speak Hebrew, but he said he heard them saying his name and the word “Oscar.”

“I realized they were attacking me specifically,” he said in an interview at a West Bank hospital after his release Tuesday. “When they say ‘Oscar’, you understand. When they say your name, you understand.”

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to the claims that Ballal was beaten by soldiers. The settler whom Ballal identified as his attacker, Shem Tov Luski — who has threatened Ballal in the past — denied he or the soldiers beat him and told the AP that he and other Palestinians in the village had thrown stones at his car. He said he didn't know Ballal was an Oscar winner.

The Israeli military said Monday it had detained three Palestinians suspected of hurling rocks as well as one Israeli civilian, who was soon released. Ballal denied throwing stones.

‘I’m dying!’

The attack took place Monday night in the southern West Bank village of Susiya. It’s part of the Masafer Yatta region featured in “No Other Land,” which depicts the Palestinian residents’ attempts to fend off settler attacks and the military’s plans to demolish their homes.

At around sunset, as residents were ending their daylong Ramadan fast, roughly two dozen Jewish settlers along with police entered the village, throwing stones at houses and breaking property, witnesses say. Around 30 soldiers arrived soon after. Jewish Israelis in an activist group supporting the villagers showed video of themselves also being attacked, with settlers hitting their car with sticks and stones.

Ballal said he filmed some of the damage caused by the settlers. Then he went to his own home and locked it, with his wife and three young children inside.

“I told myself if they will attack me, if they kill me, I will protect my family,” he said.

Ballal said Luski approached with two soldiers. He said Luski hit him on the head, knocked him to the ground and kept kicking and punching him in the head. At the same time, one soldier hit him on the legs with his gun butt, while the other pointed his weapon at him, he said.

Lamia Ballal, the director’s wife, said she was huddling inside with their children and heard him screaming, “I’m dying!”

Luski told the AP that he and other settlers had come to the village to help a fellow settler who said he was being attacked by Palestinian stone-throwers. He said dozens of masked Palestinians attacked his car with stones, including Ballal. "He broke my window, threw a stone at my chest,” he said.

He said when soldiers arrived, he led them to Ballal's house to identify him as one of the attackers but denied that he hit him or that settlers attacked any property in the village. Luski said he had footage of the night’s events but when asked to show it to the AP, he responded with a string of expletives.

On Tuesday, a small bloodstain could be seen outside Ballal's home, and the family car’s windows were shattered. Neighbors pointed to a nearby water tank with a hole in the side that they said had been punched by the settlers.

Detention

Lea Tsemel, the attorney representing Ballal and the two other Palestinians detained with him, said they were taken to an army base, where they only received minimal care for their injuries from the attack. She said they had no access to them for several hours after their arrest.

Ballal said he had no idea where he was being held, could see nothing and was “freezing” from the hours spent blindfolded under the air conditioner.

The three were transferred to an Israeli police station at the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba and were released Tuesday afternoon.

“All my body is pain,” he told the AP immediately after his release as he walked, limping, toward a hospital in the nearby Palestinian city of Hebron.

Doctors at the hospital said Ballal had bruises and scratches all over his body, abrasions under his eye and a cut on his chin but no internal injuries. The two other detained Palestinians also had minor injuries.

Confrontations with settlers

In a widely circulated video from August, Luski and several other masked settlers are seen arguing with Ballal. Luski shouts profanity at him and tries to provoke him into a fight.

“This is my land, I was given it by God,” Luski says. “Next time it won’t be nice.” He taunts Ballal with the prospect of being sent to Sde Teiman, a notorious military prison holding Palestinians detained from Gaza, where five soldiers have been charged with raping a detainee with a knife.

“Rape for a higher cause,” he says in Hebrew, then blows Ballal a kiss.

The film “No Other Land,” a joint Israeli-Palestinian production, chronicles the situation in Masafer Yatta, which the Israeli military designated as a live-fire training zone in the 1980s and ordered the expulsion of the residents, mostly Arab Bedouin. Around 1,000 residents have largely remained in place, but soldiers regularly come in to demolish homes, tents, water tanks and olive orchards.

Settlers have also set up outposts around the area and at times destroy Palestinian property. Palestinians and rights groups say Israeli forces usually turn a blind eye or intervene on behalf of the settlers.

The film has drawn ire in Israel and abroad, as when Miami Beach proposed ending the lease of a movie theater that screened it.

Basel Adra, another of the film’s co-directors and a prominent Palestinian activist in the area, said there’s been a massive upswing in attacks by settlers and Israeli forces since the Oscar win.

“We’re living in dark days here, in Gaza, and all of the West Bank," he said. "Nobody’s stopping this.”

Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, along with the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. The Palestinians want all three for their future state.

Israel has built well over 100 settlements, home to over 500,000 settlers who have Israeli citizenship. Most of the international community considers the settlements illegal.

The 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank live under seemingly open-ended Israeli military rule, with the Western-backed Palestinian Authority administering population centers.

The war in Gaza has sparked a surge of violence in the West Bank, with the Israeli military carrying out widescale military operations that have killed hundreds of Palestinians and displaced tens of thousands. There has been a rise in settler violence as well as Palestinian attacks on Israelis.

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AP correspondent Natalie Melzer in Nahariya, Israel, contributed to this report.

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