SUSYA, Palestinian Territories: Oscar-winning Palestinian filmmaker Hamdan Ballal said Wednesday that he was attacked by Israeli settlers for winning the prestigious award, calling the “brutality” life-threatening.
Israeli police released Ballal on Tuesday after detaining him the day before for allegedly “hurling rocks” following what activists described as an attack by settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Ballal co-directed “No Other Land,” which won Best Documentary at this year’s Academy Awards.
The film chronicles the forced displacement of Palestinians by Israeli troops and settlers in Masafer Yatta — an area Israel declared a restricted military zone in the 1980s.
Ballal said he had been attacked by settlers while soldiers pointed their weapons at him.
“I felt that these were the last moments of my life, that I would lose it due to the severity of the beating,” he told AFP in a video interview.
“My head was trapped between the settler’s foot, the door and the wall, as if it were a football.”
The “brutality” of the attack, he said, “made me feel it was because I won the Oscar.”
During his detention at an Israeli military center, Ballal noticed soldiers mentioning his name alongside the word “Oscar” during shift changes.
“While I couldn’t understand everything they said, I clearly recognized my name and the word ‘Oscar’, as those words don’t change in Hebrew,” he said.
According to the Israeli military, three Palestinians were apprehended on Monday for “hurling rocks” during a confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians in the southern West Bank village of Susya.
The village is located near Masafer Yatta, a grouping of hamlets south of Hebron city where “No Other Land” is set.


Yuval Abraham, who co-directed the documentary, criticized the US Academy for its silence over the issue.
“Sadly, the US Academy, which awarded us an Oscar three weeks ago, declined to publicly support Hamdan Ballal while he was beaten and tortured by Israeli soldiers and settlers,” Abraham said on X.
“While Hamdan was clearly targeted for making No Other Land... he was also targeted for being Palestinian — like countless others every day who are disregarded.”
“This, it seems, gave the Academy an excuse to remain silent when a filmmaker they honored, living under Israeli occupation, needed them the most,” Abraham added.
Israel’s military said in a statement that “claims that the detainees were beaten during the night at an IDF detention facility were found to be entirely baseless.”
“IDF (military) forces facilitated medical treatment for the detainees... and throughout the night, the detainees remained in a military detention facility while handcuffed in accordance with operational protocol,” it said, adding they were released on bail after questioning.
Activists from the anti-occupation group Center for Jewish Nonviolence said they witnessed the violence in Susya.
Foreign activists regularly stay in Masafer Yatta’s communities to accompany Palestinians as they tend to their crops or shepherd their sheep, and document instances of settler violence.
Rights groups have said that since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza — a separate Palestinian territory — there has been a spike in attacks by Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
Occupied by Israel since 1967, the West Bank is home to around three million Palestinians, as well as nearly half a million Israelis who live in settlements that are illegal under international law.

DUBAI: The BBC’s international editor, Jeremy Bowen, has accused Israel of deliberately preventing journalists from entering Gaza in an attempt to “obfuscate what’s going on, and to inject this notion of doubt into information that comes out.”

Bowen was awarded the Fellowship Award for Outstanding Contribution to Journalism at a Society of Editors conference in the UK on Tuesday.

During his acceptance speech, he said: “Why don’t they let us into Gaza? Because they don’t want us to see it. I think it’s really as simple as that.

“Israel took a bit of flak for that to start with but none now, certainly not with (US President Donald) Trump So, I don’t see that changing anytime soon.”

He praised Palestinian journalists for the “fantastic work” they are doing but said that he and other international journalists also want to report from Gaza. He again alleged that the reason Israeli authorities will not allow the international media into Gaza is because “there’s stuff that they don’t want us to see.” This contrasts sharply with the situation at the start of the conflict, Bowen added.

“Beginning after those Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, they (the Israelis) took us into the border communities,” he said. “I was in Kfar Aza when there was still fighting going on inside it. They had only just started taking out the bodies of the dead Israelis. Why did they let us in there? Because they wanted us to see it.”

In the past 18 months, Bowen said he had been permitted to spend only half a day with the Israeli army inside Gaza. He described the conflict as the “bloodiest war” since “the foundation of the Israeli state of 1948.”

He said that “if the place could open up, people could go through, look at the records, count the graves, exhume the skeletons from under the rubble and then they’d get a better idea. But when the doors shut, these things become very, very difficult.”

It was not the first time Bowen has voiced concerns about the reporting restrictions. During a report from Tel Aviv in Jan. 2025, he said: “One reason I’m standing here and not in Gaza is because the Israelis don’t let international journalists like myself in there to report freely.”

Last year, he was among 55 international journalists who signed an open letter urging Israel and Egypt to provide “free and unfettered access to Gaza for all foreign media.”

They wrote: “We call on the government of Israel to openly state its permission for international journalists to operate in Gaza, and for the Egyptian authorities to allow international journalists access to the Rafah Crossing.

“It’s vital that local journalists’ safety is respected and that their efforts are bolstered by the journalism of members of the international media. The need for comprehensive, on-the-ground reporting of the conflict is imperative.”