‘It was revenge for our movie’: Oscar winner says soldiers helped settlers attack him in West Bank

Hamdan Ballal says Israeli soldiers beat him with their rifle butts and threatened to kill him

The Oscar-winning Palestinian film director Hamdan Ballal has said that Israeli settlers who attacked him were aided by two Israeli soldiers, who beat him with the butt of their rifles outside his home and threatened to kill him.

In an interview with the Guardian, Ballal, one of the four directors of the film No Other Land, which documents the destruction of villages in the West Bank and won best documentary at this year's Academy Awards, recounted how on Monday two Israeli soldiers first encircled him while a settler was assaulting him, before violently striking him on the head and threatening to shoot him.