Palestinian filmmaker and Oscar winner Basel Adra said Israeli forces raided his home in the West Bank, searching for him and going through his wife’s phone.

Adra told the Associated Press that Israeli settlers had attacked his village on Saturday, injuring two of his brothers and a cousin. He accompanied them to the hospital, where he later learned that nine soldiers had stormed his house.

According to Adra, the forces questioned his wife, Suha, about his whereabouts, searched her phone, and briefly detained one of his uncles while their nine-month-old daughter was at home. By Saturday evening, he said he was unable to return to the village because Israeli soldiers were blocking the entrance and he feared being detained.

The raid was 'horrific'

The Israeli forces confirmed raiding the village, claiming soldiers had responded after Palestinians threw rocks that injured two Israeli settlers. It said troops were still searching the area and questioning residents.

Adra has long documented settler violence in Masafer Yatta, the southern West Bank region where he was born. He said the targeting had intensified since his film, which exposed systemic settler violence and the erasure of Palestinian life, won an Oscar earlier this year. After settlers attacked his co-director, Hamdan Ballal, in March, he told the AP that he felt their visibility had made them more vulnerable.

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He described Saturday’s raid as “horrific". “Even if you are just filming the settlers, the army comes and chases you, searches your house,” Adra said. “The whole system is built to attack us, to terrify us, to make us very scared.”

His other co-director, Yuval Abraham, said he was “terrified for Basel.” “What happened today in his village, we’ve seen this dynamic again and again, where the Israeli settlers brutally attack a Palestinian village and later on the army comes, and attacks the Palestinians.”

This comes shortly after Awdah Hathaleen, a Palestinian activist and co-star of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, was shot dead last July near the village of Umm al-Khair in the occupied West Bank. 

Hathaleen, 31, was killed during a violent settler incursion near the settlement of Carmel, in the South al-Khalil Hills. The assault began after a group of settlers, backed by heavy machinery, attacked Palestinian land. According to eyewitnesses and video evidence, Yinon Levi, an extremist settler previously sanctioned by the US administration and still blacklisted by Canada, the UK, and the EU, opened fire with a handgun. Hathaleen was shot in the upper body and later died in Soroka Medical Center.

Wider context

The Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, directed by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor, follows the residents of Masafer Yatta as they resist demolition orders issued by Israeli occupation forces. The film premiered at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival and garnered multiple international awards. 

"Israel" occupied the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the eastern part of al-Quds during the 1967 war. Palestinians regard these territories as part of a future state and argue that settlement growth undermines prospects for a negotiated 'two-state' solution. 

Masafer Yatta was declared a military training zone in the 1980s, prompting orders for the evacuation of its mainly Bedouin residents. Roughly 1,000 Palestinians have remained despite repeated demolitions of homes, tents, water systems, and olive groves, while fearing mass expulsion.

Since the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Israeli occupation forces have conducted frequent raids in the West Bank, resulting in hundreds of Palestinian killings. Settler attacks have also risen, alongside the expansion of Israeli settlements considered illegal under international law.