ReutersThree weeks ago, Palestinian film-maker Hamdan Ballal stood in front of the world’s cameras in Hollywood, picking up an Oscar for best documentary film.
The cameras were watching him again on Tuesday, a hand to his bruised face, as he walked awkwardly away in bloodstained clothes after almost 24 hours in Israeli detention.
The night before, he told reporters who had gathered outside, “settlers and soldiers [were] attacking my home”. They started “beating me and threaten me with the guns”, he added, in quotes reported by news agency AP. The soldiers, he said, shot three times in the air.
In detention – where he said he was blindfolded and held beneath a cold air conditioner – soldiers joked about him being an Oscar winner.
Just a short while earlier, outside the hilltop farmhouse he shares with his wife and children, a grey family car sits on flattened, slashed tyres, with its windows smashed and wipers torn off.
It’s a sign of the seriousness of the violence on Monday night, here on the edge of Susya in the southern occupied West Bank.
Hamdan’s co-director Basel Adra is outside the house on his phone, nervously trying to get news of his friend’s detention. He tells me how he heard of trouble starting last night and came to help.
“I saw around 15 settlers vandalising one of the homes and smashing the car, stabbing the water tanks and throwing rocks at anyone moving.
“It was dangerous. I was afraid for my life. I started to tell people to run away. We started running in different directions.”
He says Hamdan locked himself inside and tried to protect his family but realised he was bleeding and needed emergency medical aid. Then he was arrested.
Hamdan is a well-known journalist and activist. Colleagues say he’s been targeted by settlers in the past.
Israel Defense Forces says Monday’s violence began when “terrorists hurled rocks at Israeli citizens, damaging their vehicles”.
“Following this, a violent confrontation broke out, involving mutual rock-hurling between Palestinians and Israelis”.
Josh Kimelman also came to help. He’s a 28-year-old American living in the West Bank for three months with the Centre for Jewish Non-Violence. He disputes the IDF’s version of how the violence started.
“What I know is that there were Palestinian shepherds who were harassed by settlers and then a settler mob started to attack houses here.”
Josh, from New Jersey, describes how his car and his colleagues were attacked when they arrived.
“Our three friends got out of the car and were immediately attacked by settlers,” he says.
“There was one who started it and then a mob followed of maybe 15 to 20 masked settlers. They punched one of my friends in the face and neck, and hit another with a stick and shoved her. And they started throwing rocks at our car.”
Josh feels the violence was started deliberately.
“It’s likely this attack was planned. It was definitely coordinated. You don’t get a mob of 20 settlers attacking in the way that they did without some pre-planning, and so they had specific people in mind.”
ReutersBasel Adra says violence from settlers has increased here in recent months.
“There have been 45 attacks since the beginning of the year – just in this small village, not the entire Masafa Yatta.
“That’s like hundreds of attacks, every day something happening around in the community leaving us living in fright and freaking out.
“We are innocents, people living in our homes surrounded with these terrorist settlers with guns, with cars, with the army and the police not supporting us.”
Basel has just heard news that Hamdan is about to be released after paying bail, but he’s heading to hospital for further treatment before coming home.
Basel shows me the Oscar statue they were presented with earlier this month a world away in Los Angeles. He had high hopes such global recognition might help improve life for people here.
“It’s disappointing,” he says. “The movie reached the biggest stage of the world, the name of Musafa Yatta became known but that does not help us on the ground here.”
