Julian Borger
The Guardian / February 17, 2026
Hamdan Ballal says violence on West Bank as bad as ever, nearly a year after his Oscar-winning film shocked the world.
Masafer Yatta – The co-director of the Oscar-winning No Other Land has said his home and family have come under renewed attack, almost a year after the documentary on violence by Jewish settlers and the army in the West Bank received an Academy Award.
Hamdan Ballal said a group of settlers who had conducted a long-running campaign of harassment against Palestinian villagers came on Sunday to his home in Susya, in the Masafer Yatta area on the southern edge of the West Bank.
Ballal, one of the documentary’s four directors, said that since an Israeli court order two weeks before had banned non-residents from the area – in a rare legal victory for Palestinian villagers – he had called the police. Two soldiers had come instead, accompanied by a local settler leader.
“The army came first and immediately raided our house, attacking everyone inside,” Ballal said, standing outside his small concrete home, set halfway up a rocky hillside.
Last March Ballal (36) was injured in a settler attack shortly after No Other Land was awarded an Oscar. On Sunday he was not at home but the settler had instead targeted his brother Mohammed, he said.
“He gave the soldiers the order, and then they called my brother and pushed him down on the ground asking for his ID,” Ballal said. “One of them held my brother round his neck and pushed very, very hard and so that my brother couldn’t catch his breath. His face turned blue and my nephews when they saw it were scared he would die, so they took him directly to hospital.”
There Mohammed Ballal was put on oxygen and treated for trauma to his neck and bruises.
Relatives in a nearby village who got news of the attack and made their way to the Ballals’ house were intercepted by the army. Two of the director’s brothers, a nephew and a cousin were held in handcuffs and blindfolded for three hours in a nearby army base, Ballal said, before being released at night on a road used by settlers, putting them at further risk.
An Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson confirmed the detentions but denied the attack.
“On Sunday night, IDF soldiers detained a number of Palestinians adjacent to the area of Susya, after they refused to identify themselves to the soldiers. A short while after being detained, the Palestinians were released,” the spokesperson said. “We emphasise that, contrary to the claims, IDF soldiers did not assault them and did not raid their home.”
No Other Land, which won the academy award last year for best documentary feature film, portrays the destruction of Palestinian communities in Masafer Yatta, in the south Hebron hills, by Jewish settlers acting with the complicity and support of the Israeli army.
The brutality of the treatment of Palestinian villagers shocked audiences around the world and shone a light on a campaign of settlement-building, intimidation of Palestinians and village clearances across the West Bank, spearheaded by extremist members of the Israeli cabinet. Human rights groups and a UN special rapporteur have termed the campaign “ethnic cleansing”.
The Israeli government on Sunday opened a land registry for the West Bank, allowing Israelis to stake ownership claims to the occupied territory for the first time since the registration process was frozen after the 1967 war, when Israel captured the territory from Jordan.
The move appeared to be in direct defiance of Article 49 of the fourth Geneva convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its own civilian population into an occupied territory.
It was one of a series of government measures in recent days, aimed at tightening Israel’s grip on the West Bank, that have drawn rebuke from around the world and a reminder from the Trump administration that, despite its strong support for Israel, it opposes annexation of the West Bank.
“The situation has become worse,” Ballal told reporters in Susya on Tuesday. He pointed to a recent attack on another village in Masafer Yatta, in which a group of settlers had raided a Palestinian barn and killed the sheep and lambs inside. The attack was recorded on video.
Julian Borger is The Guardian’s senior international correspondent based in London
