No Other Land director Hamdan Ballal "lynched" and abducted, says co-director

Yuval Abraham says his co-director was abducted by soldiers while being treated for injuries in an ambulance.

By Mary Kate Carr | March 24, 2025 | 4:27pm

L-R: Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal and Yuval Abraham; Photo: Etienne Laurent / The Academy

Film News No Other Land

Hamdan Ballal, one of the co-directors of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, has been abducted by soldiers on the West Bank, according to his co-director Yuval Abraham. “A group of settlers just lynched Hamdan Ballal, co-director of our film No Other Land. They beat him and he has injuries in his head and stomach, bleeding,” Abraham wrote on Twitter/X. “Soldiers invaded the ambulance he called, and took him. No sign of him since.” In a similar post written in Hebrew, Abraham said it was “unclear whether [Ballal] is receiving medical treatment or what is happening to him.”

The news comes amid Israel’s ongoing attacks on Gaza, which has seen days of “relentless bombardment,” per Al Jazeera. At least 64 Palestinians have been killed in the last 24 hours, two of them journalists. The activist group Center for Jewish Nonviolence told the Associated Press that dozens of settlers attacked the Palestinian village of Susiya in the Masafer Yatta area and destroyed property there. They claim Ballal and another Palestinian man were both detained by soldiers. “They started throwing stones towards Palestinians and destroyed a water tank near Hamdan’s house,” one witness from Center for Jewish Nonviolence shared with The Guardian. Another said, “The settlers destroyed his car with stones and slashed one of the tyres. All the windows and windshields were broken.”

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On his Twitter/X page, Abraham posted a video purported to be taken on the scene; he wrote that the figure in the video is “part of the lynch mob that attacked Hamdan’s village, they continued to attack American activists, breaking their car with stones. Hamdan’s location is still unknown.” The Israeli military “said it was looking into the episode but did not immediately comment,” the AP reports.

No Other Land, which chronicles the destruction and displacement of a community on the West Bank by Israeli forces, has been controversial since its release. Despite winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary, it has struggled to find distribution. Israeli culture minister Miki Zohar called the Oscar win “a sad moment for the world of cinema,” writing on social media that “the filmmakers chose to amplify narratives that distort Israel’s image,” adding that “Freedom of expression is an important value, but turning the defamation of Israel into a tool for international promotion is not art—it is sabotage against the State of Israel, especially in the wake of the October 7th massacre and the ongoing war.” (No Other Land was filmed between 2019 and 2023 and largely completed before the October 7th attacks.)

In his Oscars acceptance speech, Abraham—an Israeli journalist who teamed up with Palestinian activists to make the film—stated that “There is a different path, a political solution without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of our people.” His co-director Basel Adra said, “No Other Land reflects the harsh reality that we have been enduring for decades and still resist as we call on the world to take serious actions to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.”

“I’m standing with Karam, Hamdan’s 7 year old son, near the blood of Hamdan’s in his house, after settlers lynched him,” Adra posted to Twitter/X on Monday. “Hamdan, co-director of our film No Other Land, is still missing after soldiers abducted him, injured and bleeding. This is how they erase Masafer Yatta.”