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Middle East Eye
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Middle East Eye
Palestinian Oscar winner missing after being severely beaten by Israeli settlers
Palestinian film director and Academy Award-winner Hamdan Ballal was violently attacked by what his colleague described as a "lynch mob" of Israeli settlers on Monday night in the Palestinian village of Susya, south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank. Susya is also the site of an Israeli settlement, which is illegal under international law and something most American administrations have agreed violates Article 49 of the Geneva Convention. Ballal's whereabouts are now unknown after Israeli soldiers then seized him from the ambulance that arrived to treat him, his co-director and fellow Oscar winner of the documentary No Other Land, Yuval Abraham, said on X. Abraham, a journalist for +972 magazine, said in a separate post featuring a shaky cell phone video that masked settlers "attacked Hamdan's village, they continued to attack American activists, breaking their car with stones". The five Jewish-American activists at the scene "are participating in a three-month long coresistance project" in Masafer Yatta, the village at the heart of No Other Land, the Center for Jewish Nonviolence said in a statement released on Monday. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Masafer Yatta is a short drive southeast of Susiya. The activists "responded to calls to come and support the village of Susiya while it was under attack," and "when the activists returned to their car to seek shelter, the settlers surrounded the car, slashed its tires, and smashed the windows with stones", the statement read. Basel Adra, the Palestinian resident of Masafer Yatta whose story is told in the film, said on Monday that he was "standing with Karam, Hamdan's 7 year old son, near the blood of Hamdan's in his house, after settlers lynched him". Ballal "is still missing after soldiers abducted him, injured and bleeding", Adra said. "This is how they erase Masafer Yatta." Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians and their homes and farms are commonplace. The attacks are often violent and can be deadly and can include the torching of property and animals and the beatings of residents. The United Nations humanitarian agency, OCHA, has documented at least 220 attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in 2025 alone. In a particularly gruesome case in 2015, an 18-month-old Palestinian boy was burned to death when settlers torched a home in Duma, south of Nablus. Former US President Joe Biden sanctioned a number of Israeli settlers for carrying out such attacks, but President Donald Trump has since lifted those sanctions. "Local and international activists regularly document the actions of settlers carrying out similar attacks, often calling the police for some sort of recourse, but settlers are rarely, if ever, held accountable for their crimes," the Center for Jewish Nonviolence said. 'Their hands were purple' Eyewitnesses have often recounted how the Israeli military either stands by as settlers carry out attacks or arrests the Palestinians and foreign activists who are defending the property. Middle East Eye recently spoke to 44-year-old activist Alex Chabbott, who was deported back to the US this month and banned from re-entering Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza "for 99 years". Chabbott was just north of Masafer Yatta in at-Tawani, as part of the International Solidarity Movement, when he said Israeli settlers arrived with assault rifles and knives to confront Palestinian families. When Chabbott and a fellow activist began filming, they were stopped by Israeli forces, searched, and accused of being the ones who brought the knives. "Then they realised that wasn't the case," Chabbott told MEE. Israeli settlers escalate attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank Read More » "They had these four Palestinian men zip-tied on the ground, with zip ties that were on super tight. Their hands were purple," he said. "And we were there maybe for about half an hour. And basically, in that half hour, what it appears to me was happening was the settlers and the military were getting their story straight that they were going to make up. I never got anyone else's point of view [and they didn't] interview the Palestinians." Chabbott was arrested and interrogated, had his phone confiscated, and was put into a detention cell before being sent back to California. He stressed the need for Americans to understand that there is no protection for Palestinian families in the West Bank as the number of Israeli settlements grows. "They literally have free reign to do whatever they want, whenever they want," he told MEE. "They can just come in, steal a bunch of stuff, break solar panels, and eventually, you know, some of these [Palestinian] families either get orders to leave by the military, their homes are destroyed, or some just give in because they're like, 'I can't live like this anymore'."
Al Manar
17-02-2025
- Politics
- Al Manar
Israeli Occupation Used Palestinian Elderly as Gaza Human Shield: Report
The Israeli occupation military forced an 80-year-old Palestinian man to act as a human shield in Gaza by tying an explosive cord around his neck and threatening to have his head blown off, an investigation has found. A senior officer from the occupation army's Nahal Brigade tied the explosive cord around the man's neck before he was ordered to scout houses the Israeli outlet The Hottest Place in Hell found in an investigation. After eight hours, soldiers ordered the man to flee with his wife from their home in Gaza City's Zeitoun neighborhood in May, said +972 magazine, which reported the piece in partnership with The Hottest Place in Hell. But when another Israeli battalion spotted the elderly couple on the street, they were shot dead on the spot, according to Israeli occupation soldiers present at the scene. The Israeli soldiers had initially encountered the couple in their home. They told Arabic-speaking soldiers that they were unable to flee to southern Gaza due to mobility difficulties. But even in his condition, the soldiers forced the unnamed 80-year-old to walk ahead of them with his cane, while his wife was detained in their house. Additional details of the methods of warfare used in Gaza by the Israeli military and the deployment of civilians as human shields, then executed. The amount of evidence on the use of the practice in Gaza is unprecedented. It is clearly a military policy. — Nicola Perugini (@PeruginiNic) February 16, 2025 A soldier told the investigation that the Israeli commander had decided to use the Palestinian couple as 'mosquitoes', referring to a procedure where the Israeli army forces Palestinian civilians to serve as human shields to protect the Israeli forces from being shot or blown up. 'He entered each house before us so that if there were [explosives] or a militant inside, he would [take the hit] instead of us,' one soldier said. 'He was told that if he did anything wrong or didn't follow orders, the soldier behind him would pull the cord, and his head would be torn from his body.' The man was forced to act as a human shield for eight hours, before he was ordered, along with his wife, to walk towards the so-called 'humanitarian zone' in southern Gaza. But the soldiers did not care to tell nearby Israeli divisions that the couple was going to pass through the area, according to the testimonies. 'After 100 meters, the other battalion saw them and immediately shot them,' a soldier said. 'They died like that, in the street.' More reports emerge on the Israeli occupation army's war crimes committed against the Palestinian people throughout 16 months of genocidal war in Gaza, with the atrocities of the so-called 'most moral army in the world' are being exposed.
