Hamdan Ballal, co-director of No Other Land, has been released by Israel
Rights — di Simone Santi
Hamdan Ballal has been released by Israel: he had been arrested the previous day after being attacked by settlers in the West Bank.
Hamdan Ballal, co-director of No Other Land, has been released by Israel
Hamdan Ballal has been released by Israel: he had been arrested the previous day after being attacked by settlers in the West Bank.
Hamdan Ballal, one of the directors of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, has been released by Israeli authorities, who had arrested him the previous evening in the West Bank. His lawyer recounted that he had been "handcuffed, blindfolded and beaten throughout the night at a military base". Ballal, a Palestinian national, had been arrested along with two other compatriots in a village south of Hebron, in the West Bank — the very land depicted in the documentary he co-directed, which chronicles the abuses perpetrated by Israeli settlers against Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank.
According to witnesses present, Ballal was recognised and attacked by dozens of Israeli settlers, pelted with stones that wounded him in the head, while Israeli soldiers present during the assault did not intervene. The Israeli army's version of events is that the Palestinians, including Ballal, responded to the attack by throwing stones in turn. Ballal was then arrested and taken away despite having already called an ambulance for medical assistance.
No Other Land, filmed from 2019 to 2023, documents the destruction and forced displacement carried out by Israeli settlers in the southern West Bank, particularly in the village of Masafer Yatta. It was made by an independent Israeli-Palestinian collective, and in addition to the Oscar it also won at the Berlin film festival. The two protagonists are also two of the four directors: Basel Adra, Palestinian, and Yuval Abraham, Israeli, while alongside Hamdan Ballal, the Iranian-born Rachel Szor also co-directed. No Other Land's Oscar victory had predictably sparked strong protests in Israel over the way the settlers are portrayed in the film.