Palestinian Oscar-winning director Basel Adra said that Israeli soldiers conducted a raid at his West Bank home on Saturday (Sep 13), searching for him and going through his wife’s phone.
Israeli settlers attacked his village, injuring two of his brothers and one cousin, Adra told The Associated Press (AP). He accompanied them to the hospital. While there, he said that he heard from family in the village that nine Israeli soldiers had stormed his home.
The soldiers asked his wife, Suha, for his whereabouts and went through her phone, he said, while his 9-month-old daughter was home. They also briefly detained one of his uncles, he added.
As of Saturday night, Adra said he had no way of returning home to check on his family, because soldiers were blocking the entrance to the village and he was scared of being detained.
Israel’s military didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Adra has spent his career as a journalist and filmmaker chronicling settler violence in Masafer Yatta, the southern reaches of the West Bank, where he was born. After settlers attacked his co-director, Hamdan Ballal, in March, he told the AP that he felt they were being targeted more intensely since winning the Oscar.
He described Saturday’s events as “horrific.”
“Even if you are just filming the settlers, the army comes and chases you, searches your house,” he said. “The whole system is built to attack us, to terrify us, to make us very scared.”
The film’s co-director, Israeli journalist 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.”
