Israeli occupation forces arrested Hamdan Ballal, the Palestinian co-director of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, this week after he was brutally attacked by a mob of Israeli settlers at his home in the occupied West Bank.
Shortly after the attack, Ballal’s Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham posted on X: “Soldiers invaded the ambulance he called, and took [Ballal].”
Ballal and two other Palestinians were released from Israeli detention on Tuesday. Ballal reportedly left a police station in the settlement of Kiryat Arba with bruises on his face and blood on his clothes. He said he was beaten, denied proper treatment for his injuries and mocked by soldiers during his detention.
No Other Land documents the destruction of Palestinian villages in an area declared a military “firing zone” by the Israeli occupation forces — a tactic that human rights monitors say Israel uses to make land grabs. After the documentary won an Oscar at the beginning of this month, settlers have reportedly stepped up their attacks on Ballal and his family.
Following Ballal’s arrest, the Israeli occupation forces claimed they “apprehended three Palestinians suspected of hurling rocks.” But peace activists who witnessed the settler attacks dismissed that statement.
The Maple spoke with Canadian peace activist Anna Lippman, who is in the occupied West Bank and saw the attacks firsthand.
She described what happened during the attacks, the broader issue of the Israeli state’s direct involvement in settler violence and the silence of most Canadian political leaders on this issue during the current election.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Alex Cosh: You have a first-hand eyewitness account of what actually happened. So maybe you could just start by sharing that.
Anna Lippman: At around 6 o'clock [Monday] night, which is when everyone was sitting down to their Iftar meal to break the Ramadan fast, myself and other international activists got a call from some of the villagers in Susya, which is Hamdan’s village, saying that there was an attack happening near some houses by the school there.
So we drove over from a different village. It took us about 15 minutes to get there, and during that time, Hamdan had already been beaten, and a few other Palestinians had already been beaten, and a car belonging to one of the Palestinians had already been completely smashed and obliterated.
We arrived kind of at the base of the hill that the house is on. So we see soldiers and other figures standing at the top of the hill. Myself and two activists get out of the car, and we’re almost immediately ambushed by young settlers. They’re yelling at us. They have rocks and sticks.
Another person I was with was pushed and hit with a stick. Then they started throwing rocks at us. We quickly ran back to the car. They continued to throw rocks. They smashed the front windshield, smashed the back windshield, completely shattered the window next to me, and at that moment, there were some Palestinian activists, including Hamdan’s co-director Basel [Adra] running up, yelling at the army to stop the settlers.
And so all that commotion actually stopped the settlers and got them to run away. The army that had watched this entire thing go down didn’t move a muscle.
When it was over, we started yelling at them to go get the settlers who had just attacked us. They wouldn’t move, and they also wouldn’t let us go up to the house where the original attack had happened. So a few other activists that I was with, as well as Basel, actually saw Hamdan being led blindfolded and handcuffed to an army vehicle.
Eventually, the army lets us go, so we run up the hill. We try to talk to the police. We had been calling them all this time. They refused to engage with us, refused to talk to us, except to demand our passports and proof of ownership for the car.
They wouldn’t tell us a single thing about Hamdan and everyone just kind of drove off and left us there with an ambulance still for some other Palestinians who had also been hurt, and Hamdan and two other folks had been arrested.
And then shortly after that, Hamdan’s family actually took us to his house and showed us all the blood splatter that his wound had left on the steps outside and inside the house.
AC: That’s a really horrifying account. I understand Hamdan is out of custody now. Have you heard from him? How is he doing?
AL: He and the two other prisoners he was with were immediately taken to the hospital for the care that they didn't receive the night before. Hamdan’s condition was moderate. He was in the hospital for several hours. Now, thankfully, he’s back in the village.
He’s home with his family. He’s doing a lot better, definitely recovering. But you know, the injury is still there, and of course, the charges are still there. They’ve been released on bail, right? So theoretically, the police, the army, could come back at any moment and re-arrest them for their crime of supposedly throwing rocks at the settlers, right?
AC: There’s been some speculation as well that this comes against the backdrop of the film Hamdan co-directed winning the Oscar. Is there a sense, then, that these attacks were directly linked to that, and that the attacks have stepped up precisely because of the success of this film?
AL: Certainly in the past month, as more attention has been paid to this area, the attacks have definitely increased in both severity and just the number of attacks.
The night of the Oscars, there was a very similar attack in the main village of Susya, where 20 plus young men attacked water towers, attacked cars. Just the Monday before this one, there was a similar attack in the morning.
[Locals have] filed countless petitions with the court, filed countless complaints with the police in the last month, and nothing has seemed to be done about it. It’s hard to, you know, say for certain if it’s an increased and co-ordinated effort, but it’s certainly gotten worse, which I think was hard to imagine a month ago.
AC: I want to come now to the Israeli military’s involvement. A common narrative we hear, including from the Canadian government, in regards to settler violence, is to kind of separate what they would call “extremist settlers” from the Israeli state and the Israeli military. But as it seems this experience has illuminated quite starkly, the two are very much intertwined.
AL: Absolutely. So first, let’s be clear. Since October 7, 2023, when most soldiers were sent to Gaza, a number of reserve army soldiers in the West Bank are these very same radical settlers who previously were too right wing for the military.
So beyond the fact that both sides kind of work together, there’s actually a melding of the sides, but very often when settlers come, when they attack, they love when the military comes, because the military protects them. The military has the authority to arrest the Palestinians, and the military, all they need is the word, a mere quip from a settler saying Palestinians were talking about maybe throwing rocks at us. And for this, Palestinians are arrested, right?
And so it’s a fun little dance that Israel likes to do where they can point to the extremist settlers and say, ‘Oh, we’re trying to keep them in control.’ They are not the state, but they allow the state to function in this way, where they ethnically cleanse, where they arrest, while being able to have the settlers to point to, to keep this separation in the public’s eye, right?
But the reality on the ground is, besides the fact that now you can’t tell a settler from a soldier from a settler-soldier, they all work hand-in-hand anyways, right? The settlers direct the army who to arrest.
AC: The Canadian government’s officially stated position is that they don’t recognize permanent Israeli control over the occupied West Bank. And yet, there’s near absolute silence when we see these kinds of attacks, when we see the growth of settlements and so forth. So what do you make of that in this context? There’s been no statement that I’m aware of from any Canadian official regarding this attack.
AL: I think it’s shameful, but not surprising. We’ve seen the way that our trade, and our political interests within Israel really bolsters the Canadian state. And so for them to call out this settler violence, for them to make a statement, would mean that they are shooting themselves in the foot economically, right?
An election is coming up. This is an election issue in a way that we have never seen before, right? So the government is not making a statement — that in itself is making a statement to their constituents.
We saw them sanction a few settlers, so that’s great, but why haven’t they sanctioned more? Why have they pulled the charitable status of [the Jewish National Fund] Canada and the other organization, but not the many orgs that are helping in the West Bank to keep this work going?
It’s shameful that Canada doesn’t make a statement, but once they make a statement, we’re going to ask them to stop allowing charities to collect for these settlements in the West Bank. Stop allowing our weapons to go to these soldiers in the West Bank, right? So for them, it’s a slippery slope. You can’t really call something out as you’re giving them the thumbs up with the other hand.
AC: What does your work in the occupied West Bank involve? And maybe could you speak to the kind of disconnect between what you’re seeing on the ground and how little this is being discussed in the current Canadian election cycle?
AL: I am currently in the region of Masafer Yatta. I’ve been here for a month and a half. I’ll be here for another month and a half. What I’m seeing is extremely similar to what is in the film No Other Land, which is about this place.
What I’ve been experiencing in my time here is constant, relentless attacks. Sometimes they’re violent, sometimes they’re not violent, but either way, they disrupt the lives of the people here. They cause immense fear. They disrupt an ability to plan for the next day, for the next week, for people here to really lead any semblance of a normal life, right?
Hamdan’s children had to go to school today as their father was missing. And these are the conditions that the children here are forced to go to school in every day, because otherwise they will never go to school, right?
I’m seeing the deprivation of the most basic things that we in Canada never think about. This ability to feel safe in our own homes, our ability to turn on the lights and know there will be electricity, our ability to know that no one is going to poison our water supply in the middle of the night.
And these are the things that even children worry about when they go to sleep, right? Gaza is such a mirror and sort of microscope into what is happening all over Palestine, but this ethnic cleansing, be it on the massive scale that we’re seeing in Gaza, or in this slow, painful way that we’re seeing in the West Bank, it’s the same tactics, it’s the same goal, and it’s the same ideology.
And so really, what I want to see us talking about during this election is what our politicians are going to do to sanction Israel the state. Not Netanyahu, not a few bad settlers, but the state that is orchestrating this entire show.
This is a pattern. Last week, another Palestinian was arrested for calling the police because his life was in danger from settlers, and he didn’t get this much media attention, right? So I think as wonderful as this media coverage is, it’s important to know that this happens every single day, and not everyone is as lucky to get this media attention.
