Oscar-winning director Basel Adra’s home in West Bank raided by Israeli soldiers

Jerusalem: Palestinian filmmaker and Oscar winner Basel Adra said that Israeli soldiers raided his home in the occupied West Bank on Saturday, looking for him and checking through his wife’s phone.

He told the Associated Press that Israeli settlers had earlier attacked his village, injuring two of his brothers and a cousin, whom he helped take to the hospital. While there, he learned from relatives that nine soldiers had entered his house.

According to him, the soldiers questioned his wife Suha about his whereabouts, inspected her phone while their 9-month-old daughter was at home, and briefly detained one of his uncles.

Adra said he could not return to his family that night because soldiers had blocked the village entrance, and he feared being arrested.

The Israeli military stated that its forces entered the village after Palestinians allegedly threw stones that injured two Israeli civilians. It confirmed that troops were still on the ground, carrying out searches and questioning residents.

Adra, however, rejected the military’s version, insisting that settlers were the aggressors and that neither he nor anyone from his village had thrown stones.

Footage recorded by Basel Adra’s cousin and reviewed by the Associated Press showed settlers attacking a man identified by Adra as his brother, Adam Adra, who was later treated in hospital for bruises on his hand, elbow, and chest, according to medical records shared with the outlet.

Another video captured a settler chasing a solidarity activist through an olive grove and tackling her to the ground.

Adra, who has long documented settler violence in Masafer Yatta, the southern West Bank region where he grew up, said he believes the targeting of him and his colleagues has intensified since winning an Oscar. In March, his co-director Hamdan Ballal was also attacked by settlers.

Their film No Other Land, which won this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary, follows the efforts of Masafer Yatta residents to resist Israeli military attempts to demolish their villages. The project was a joint Palestinian-Israeli collaboration, co-directed by Adra, Ballal, and Israeli filmmakers Abraham and Rachel Szor.

The documentary has received multiple international honours, beginning with its win at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2024. At the same time, it has provoked backlash in Israel and abroad — including controversy in the U.S., where Miami Beach authorities even considered terminating the lease of a theatre that screened the documentary.

The broader context of the story lies in the decades-long conflict over the West Bank. Israel seized the territory, along with Gaza and East Jerusalem, during the 1967 Middle East war. Palestinians consider all three areas part of their hoped-for future state and regard settlement expansion as a key obstacle to achieving a two-state solution.

Israel has since established more than 100 settlements in the West Bank, now home to over half a million Israeli citizens. Roughly 3 million Palestinians in the territory live under prolonged Israeli military control, with the Palestinian Authority managing urban centres.

In the 1980s, the Israeli military declared Masafer Yatta a live-fire training zone and ordered the expulsion of its largely Bedouin population. Though around 1,000 residents remain, they face frequent demolitions of homes, tents, water tanks, and olive groves, and live under constant threat of removal.

The situation has worsened since the war in Gaza, with Israeli military operations in the West Bank killing hundreds of Palestinians. At the same time, settler violence against Palestinians has escalated, alongside an increase in Palestinian attacks on Israelis.