The Israeli police questioned a Palestinian director of an Oscar-winning documentary on Tuesday, according to the authorities and his lawyer, after witnesses reported that Israeli settlers attacked him near his home in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The police were holding Hamdan Ballal, 37, one of the directors of the film, “No Other Land,” and two other Palestinians on suspicion of hurling stones at Israeli vehicles and injuring a settler — accusations they all deny, according to Leah Tsemel, a lawyer representing the detainees.
One settler, a minor, was also detained, but he was released for medical treatment and would be questioned later, according to the Israeli police.
The details of the episode are not entirely clear. But Palestinian witnesses and a group of American activists on the scene said that before he was arrested, Mr. Ballal was set upon as a group of assailants, many of whom were masked, attacked his home village of Susya.
The episode drew attention to rising settler violence in the West Bank. During the past year, Jewish extremists have thrown rocks at Palestinians, set cars on fire and defaced homes. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded more than 1,000 incidents of settler violence in 2024.
President Trump has taken a softer stance on settler violence, canceling sanctions imposed by the Biden administration against individuals accused of carrying out violent acts against Palestinians. On Tuesday, a confirmation hearing for Mike Huckabee, Mr. Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel and an outspoken supporter of settlement building, is set to begin.
The two sides provided different accounts about how the episode began. In a statement, the Israeli military said “several terrorists” had hurled stones at Israeli vehicles, igniting a violent confrontation in which Israelis and Palestinians threw rocks at one another.
Nasser Nawaja, a fieldworker for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem who lives in Susya, and other Palestinians said the confrontation began after the town’s residents had sought to drive away Israeli shepherds herding livestock on land claimed by the village. The group of masked Israelis soon joined the others on the outskirts of the village, where they attacked two Palestinian homes, they said.
Two American activists with a group that provides protection in areas vulnerable to settler violence, Josh Kimelman and Joseph Kaplan Weinger, said they responded to distress calls from Palestinians. The attackers also surrounded their car, smashing it with stones, they said. They were just a few minutes’ walk from Mr. Ballal’s house at the time, Mr. Kimelman said.
Ms. Tsemel, the detainees’ lawyer, said that she had spoken with her clients by phone. She said that Mr. Ballal told her that an Israeli assailant punched him, knocking him over, and continued to beat him while he lay on the ground.
Mr. Ballal said he received some medical treatment at an Israeli military facility before being held handcuffed and blindfolded on the floor of a detention center, according to Ms. Tsemel.
Basel Adra, another director of the documentary, said that he was also at the scene. He shared video footage that he said he had filmed of a blindfolded man he identified as Mr. Ballal being marched by Israeli forces to waiting vehicles. Mr. Adra said Israeli soldiers and police officers on the scene did little to stop the masked Israeli assailants, even as they sought to disperse the Palestinians. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the claims.
Mr. Ballal was among four directors — the others were Mr. Adra, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham — in a Palestinian-Israeli collective that received the Academy Award for best documentary this month. The film documents the demolition of West Bank residents’ homes in or near the villages of Masafer Yatta by Israeli forces claiming the area for a live-fire military training ground.
After enduring repeated attacks, Palestinian residents in the southern West Bank, including from Mr. Hamdan’s village, took their case to the Israeli Supreme Court at the end of 2023, arguing that Israeli security authorities were not protecting them from attacks, and that as a result, some villagers had fled their homes.
In a ruling, the court expressed concern over Israel’s failure to protect them and said the government — including the Israeli military — must protect Palestinians against future attacks “even in the complicated circumstances of this period.”
