HEBRON, West Bank (AP) — Israeli authorities have released an Oscar-winning Palestinian director who was detained by the army after being attacked by Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank. He said they beat him in front of his house while they filmed the attack.
Hamdan Baral and other directors of “No Other Lands,” which focus on the struggles of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, made their appearance on stage at the 97th Academy Awards in Los Angeles, when they won the best documentary film earlier this month.
On Tuesday, he was released from an Israeli police station in Kiryat Alba’s West Bank settlement, with bruises on his face and blood in his clothes. He and the other Palestinians who had been attacked and detained were taken to a nearby hospital.
Baral said he was detained at an army base, blindfolded for 24 hours and forced to sleep under frozen air conditioners.
“My whole body is in pain,” he told The Associated Press. “I heard the soldiers, they were laughing at me… I heard the ‘Oscars’ but I didn’t speak Hebrew. ”
Lea Tsemel, the lawyer representing the three men, said she received minimal care for injuries caused by the attack and had no access to them for hours after her arrest.
Palestinian residents say that around 20 settlers (several masks, some gun-carrying people and uniforms) attacked the villages in the West Bank village on Monday evening.
When the soldiers arrived, they said they pointed guns at the Palestinians, but the settlers continued to throw stones.
Israeli police said Tuesday that the military had transferred three suspects for investigations suspected of throwing rocks, property damage and “putting the safety of the area at risk.” The three said the release was made on the condition that there was no contact with anyone involved in the incident. Tsemel said Baral and two other Palestinians denied the throwing stone.
‘I’m dying! ‘
In testimony given to his lawyers while in custody, Baral said he went out to photograph the settlers when he attacked the village home. When he returned to his home, testimony seen by the Associated Press showed that famous settlers who had threatened him in the past appeared along with two soldiers.
At the entrance to his house, the settlers punched a ball from behind his head in his head, knocked him on the ground, kicking him across his body with his boots, smacking him in the head and face, Baral said.
The director’s wife, Ramia Baral, says she is swarming with her three children and hears him screaming, “I’m dying!” When she looked out the window, she saw three uniform men pounding the ball, another man wearing a rifle ass and civilian clothes that appeared to be filming violence.
“Of course, after the Oscars, they started attacking us more,” Lamia said. “I felt fear.”
West Bank settlers are often armed and sometimes wear military style clothing that makes it difficult to distinguish them from soldiers.
On Tuesday, small blood stains were seen outside the house, causing the car’s windshield and windows to shatter. The neighbor pointed to a nearby aquarium with a hole on the side that he said was punched by the settlers.
In a video that has been widely circulating since April, the settlers who defeated the ball can be seen threatening him along with a masked man.
“This is my land, I’ve given it to you by God,” the settler says on the video, screaming blasphemy and trying to provoke the ball to fight him. “Next time will not be good,” says the settlers.
The film struggles to stay on Palestinian lands
“There are no other lands” records the struggles by residents of the Masafayatta region to stop Israeli forces from destroying their villages.
The Israeli-Palestine co-production won a series of international awards that began at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival. It also sparked rage in Israel and abroad when Miami Beach proposed to end the lease of the cinemas where it was screened.
Basel Adora, another co-director of the film and a prominent Palestinian activist in the region, said that since Oscar won, there had been a massive rise in attacks by settlers and Israeli forces.
“No one can do anything to stop the pogrom. The soldiers are there just to promote and help the attack,” he said. “We live here, on Gaza and all the dark days on the banks of the Jordan River…no one has stopped this.”
Stick-equipped masked settlers also attacked Jewish activists in the area on Monday, destroying car windows and cutting down tires, according to Josh Kimelman, an activist at the Jewish non-violence center. The video provided by the group showed masked settlers shoving their fists and shaking them in the dusty fields of the night.
Open-ended military rules
Israel captured the West Bank along with the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East War. Palestinians are seeking all three for their future states and viewing the growth of the settlement as a major obstacle to the two states’ solutions. Most of the international community believes that settlements are illegal.
Israel has built over 100 settlements, home to over half a million settlers who have Israeli citizenship. Three million Palestinians on the West Bank live under Israeli military control, where Western-backed Palestinian authorities seem to control the population centre.
The Israeli army designated Masafayatta in the west bank of the Southern Jordan River as a live-action strip in the 1980s, ordering to expel mostly Arab Bedouins. Around 1,000 inhabitants remain primarily intact, but soldiers regularly destroy homes, tents, aquariums and olive orchards.
Settlers also set up front posts in the area and sometimes attack villages. Palestinians and rights groups say Israeli forces usually turn a blind eye or intervene or intervene on behalf of the settlers.
The war in Gaza sparked a surge in violence in the West Bank, with Israeli forces carrying out a wide range of military operations that killed hundreds of Palestinians and ousted tens of thousands of people. Similar to Palestinian attacks on Israelis, there is an increase in settler violence.
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