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At the Academy<\/span> Awards earlier this month, Palestinian filmmaker Hamdan Ballal was honored<\/a> with his co-directors for their documentary \u201cNo Other Land,\u201d chronicling the Israeli government\u2019s destruction and takeover of Palestinian land in the West Bank. The same night, his village was the site of an attack by settlers.<\/p>\n In the weeks since, settlers have continued to return to his village, Khirbet Susya in the Masafer Yatta region, south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank. And on Monday, Ballal warned his family to stay inside their home then stepped out to confront a band of settlers who had started to harass other villagers just as families began to gather for iftar, according to activists with the Center for Jewish Nonviolence who responded to the incident and interviewed relatives.\u00a0<\/p>\n The settlers struck him in the head and stomach with clubs and rocks, then went on to attack another home, destroying water tanks and stealing security cameras, according to activists.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cHe had sent his family inside when the settlers approached \u2014 he sent them inside to keep them safe, and then he went outside to scare them off, or to send them away \u2014 that\u2019s when he got attacked,\u201d said Raviv Rose, an activist with the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, who lives in the neighboring village of Um al-Khair and responded to the attack on Monday.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ballal was subsequently arrested by the Israeli soldiers who pulled him from an ambulance<\/a>, along with two other Palestinian residents of Susya, Khaled Mohammad Shanran and Nasser Shreteh, peace activists said. The three men were taken to a military base in Susya where they were held overnight and expected to face interrogations Tuesday morning, the men\u2019s attorneys had told activists.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not an isolated thing \u2014 the scale of attacks is ongoing.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n News of Ballal\u2019s arrest spread quickly, with much of the focus on the fact the award-winning filmmaker was the victim of the very violence his documentary depicts. The attack on Susya marks the latest incident in a long pattern<\/a> of violence<\/a> that has only escalated in the area since the Oscars, amid an ongoing government-sanctioned annexation push<\/a> to forcibly remove<\/a> Palestinians from the West Bank<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not an isolated thing \u2014 the scale of attacks is ongoing,\u201d Rose said. \u201cIn Susya alone \u2014 where Hamdan and Nasser live \u2014 this stuff has happened, it feels like almost every day.\u201d<\/p>\n Since the Academy Awards ceremony on March 2, where Ballal joined co-directors Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham<\/a>, and Rachel Szor on stage, there have been at least four other settler attacks on Susya, according to the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, along with other attacks and military demolitions in surrounding villages across Masafer Yatta.<\/p>\n Adra, a native of Masafer Yatta who was also featured in the film, had been documenting much of the violence near his home in recent months. In early February, days after \u201cNo Other Land\u201d received its Academy Award nomination for best documentary, Adra reported a settler attack on Susya<\/a>, in which armed settlers damaged his friend\u2019s vehicle, slashing tires with knives, punctured water tanks, and hurled stones at houses.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cNeither I nor anyone else could get close \u2014 they were armed,\u201d Adra wrote in the February post sharing video of the incident. \u201cWe risked our life to film. Some settlers eventually returned to the outpost before the eyes of the police and soldiers.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n