Oscar winner Hamdan Ballal probably arrested in West Bank

The Palestinian director and Oscar winner Hamdan Ballal was arrested in the West Bank, according to an Israeli colleague. Before his alleged arrest by the Israeli army, the filmmaker was attacked by “a group of” extremist Jewish settlers, the director Juval Abraham said on Monday in online service X.

Abraham and Ballal had been awarded this year’s Oscar for their documentary “No other Land” about the evacuation of Palestinian villages in the occupied West Bank by the Israeli army.

The radical settlers had beaten Ballal, wrote Abraham at X. He suffered injuries to the head and stomach. Afterwards, soldiers had taken Ballal from an ambulance called. “No trace of him since then,” wrote Abraham.

With reference to the Israeli military, the dpa news agency reports that “some terrorists” (words from the military) threw stones against Israeli citizens and damaged their vehicles. As a result, groups of Israelis and Palestinians had thrown each other with stones, whereupon the police and army had separated the groups. Ballal was hit by a stone on the head, the eyewitnesses said.

The sources of the dpa also report that Ballal was taken from an ambulance by Israeli soldiers. In a statement, the Israeli military denied that a Palestinian had been brought out of an ambulance.

The incident occurred from the organization Center for Jewish Nonviolence in the village of Sussija in the south of the West Bank. Members of the NGO had filmed the incident, it said. At the request of the AFP news agency, the Israeli army explained that it was checking the information.