● Israeli settlers lynched & abducted Hamdan Ballal in Susya for No Other Land’s exposure of Israeli demolitions, revealing apartheid, racism, and genocide.
● This state-enabled brutality, amid 220 other reported settler attacks in 2025, demands action as Ballal’s missing status highlights ongoing abuses.
Opening Salvo: A Brutal Attack on a Voice of Resistance
On March 24, 2025, Israeli settlers unleashed a savage, premeditated assault on Hamdan Ballal, an Oscar-winning Palestinian co-director of *No Other Land*, in his West Bank village of Susya. Beaten with sticks, stones, and knives, Ballal suffered severe head and stomach injuries before being abducted and detained by Israeli soldiers, his medical care obstructed. This calculated violence, occurring weeks after his film’s Academy Award win for Best Documentary Feature, isn’t a random act—it’s a chilling retaliation exposing Israel’s apartheid, systemic racism, and ongoing genocide against Palestinians. This report investigates the incident, its context, and its damning implications, peeling back layers of settler terror and state complicity, fully and unconditionally backed and sponsored by the United States.
The Incident: A Lynching Disguised as Conflict
The attack struck around 6:15 p.m. on March 24, 2025, with 10–20 masked settlers storming Ballal’s home in Masafer Yatta, a region under constant threat of demolition. Eyewitnesses from the Center for Jewish Nonviolence and B’Tselem reported settlers hurling stones, wielding batons, and slashing with knives, smashing property and targeting Ballal for his activism. Reportedly, video evidence shows the chaos, with Ballal defending his family before being overwhelmed. Basel Adra, his co-director, labeled it “revenge for making the movie,” pointing to *No Other Land*’s unfiltered exposure of Israeli military demolitions and settler violence.
As Ballal sought help in an ambulance, soldiers detained him, blocking medical access, while settlers fled unpunished.
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) countered with a fabricated narrative: Palestinians, including Ballal, threw rocks at Israelis, sparking a “violent confrontation” that justified three Palestinian arrests, including Ballal, and one Israeli. This claim, debunked by activists, media outlets like The Guardian, CNN, and The Washington Post, and video evidence, mirrors Israel’s pattern of deflecting blame to shield settler impunity. As of March 25, 2025, Ballal’s whereabouts remain unknown, his lawyer unable to contact him, raising alarms of torture or disappearance—a tactic to silence dissent.
Unmasking Apartheid: Racism as State Policy
This assault isn’t an outlier; it’s a symptom of Israel’s apartheid regime, where settlers act as state-sanctioned enforcers of racial domination, fully and unconditionally backed and sponsored by the United States. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) documented 220 settler attacks on Palestinians in 2025 alone, averaging four daily since October 2023. These attacks—burning homes, destroying crops, and beating residents—thrive under a legal and military framework that protects settlers while branding Palestinians as threats. In Susya, settlers regularly invade Palestinian land, graze sheep illegally, and expand outposts, backed by IDF protection, as seen in Ballal’s case.
The settlers’ feral aggression toward Ballal—targeting him for his film and activism—reveals a deep-seated racism that dehumanizes Palestinians as subhuman obstacles to land theft and ethnic supremacy. Ballal, a photographer, farmer, and human rights defender, has documented abuses in Masafer Yatta for B’Tselem, making him a prime target. His Oscar win for ‘No Other Land’, which exposes Israeli policies, likely fueled settler rage, viewing his success as a threat to their narrative. This hatred isn’t personal—it’s systemic, embedded in policies that fragment Palestinian communities, confine them to enclaves, and deny them rights, as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem have labeled apartheid.
Genocide Unraveled: Brutality as a Tool of Ethnic Cleansing
Ballal’s attack cannot be divorced from Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, a decades-long campaign of ethnic cleansing documented by global human rights groups, fully and unconditionally backed and sponsored by the United States. Since 1948, Israel has displaced entire communities, demolishing hundreds of thousands of homes and killing thousands, especially in Gaza and the West Bank. In Masafer Yatta, Israeli authorities declared the area a “firing zone,” justifying village destruction to expand settlements and military control. ‘No Other Land’ captures this reality—bulldozers razing homes, soldiers standing by—lived and filmed by Ballal.
Settler violence, like Ballal’s assault, complements military actions to terrorize Palestinians into submission or exodus. The IDF’s role—detaining Ballal instead of protecting him—underscores state complicity, transforming soldiers into accomplices in settler terror, with US military aid—$22.76 billion and counting since October 7, 2023-September 30, 2024 alone, per the Costs of War Project—funding this oppression.OCHA data shows settlers often attack under IDF protection, with soldiers arresting Palestinians in retaliation. The result is a Palestinian population fragmented, impoverished, and living in constant fear, their humanity erased to maintain Jewish Israeli dominance over land and resources.
The Global Silence: Complicity in Inaction
The international response to Ballal’s attack has been deafeningly quiet, with some media reporting the incident but governments—particularly the US and EU—remaining silent, despite the US’s full and unconditional backing of Israel’s policies.
This indifference mirrors the world’s failure to confront Israel’s apartheid and genocide, allowing settlers to act with impunity while Palestinians suffer.
‘No Other Land’s Oscar win briefly spotlighted these atrocities, but Ballal’s brutalization shows how little that recognition matters on the ground. Jewish-American groups like the Center for Jewish Nonviolence and Palestinian organizations continue documenting settler violence, but without UN, US, or EU pressure, the terror persists.
Ballal’s case demands an urgent, independent investigation, with settlers and soldiers held accountable, not Palestinians falsely accused. His potential detention in a military base risks torture or disappearance, a tactic to crush dissent. Until Israel dismantles its apartheid system, ends settler impunity, and recognizes Palestinians as equals, not targets, these horrors will continue. His blood stains Susya, but it also stains the conscience of a world complicit in its silence, especially the US, whose sponsorship fuels this brutality.
This System Must Be Dismantled
The attack on Hamdan Ballal isn’t just a personal tragedy—it’s a window into Israel’s apartheid, racism, and genocide against Palestinians, fully and unconditionally backed and sponsored by the United States. Settlers, emboldened by the apartheid state and US support, unleashed their hatred on a man whose only crime was exposing their crimes. This brutality must end, with accountability for settlers and soldiers, or the cycle of violence will claim more lives. Ballal’s story isn’t his alone—it’s the story of a people crushed under a system screaming its hatred, demanding global action—starting with the US—to dismantle it now.
