Palestinian director Basel Adra, who won an Oscar this year for co-directing a documentary on Israeli violence in the West Bank, sounded the alarm at the UN on Thursday, saying the situation was worsening despite the film’s success.
Adra was invited to speak by the UN Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People at a screening of his film, No Other Land.
The documentary chronicles the forced displacement of Palestinians by Israeli troops and settlers in Masafer Yatta — an area Israel declared a restricted military zone in the 1980s.
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“I have carried the camera since I was a teenager. I started filming what was happening to my village and the villages around me, to me and my family — all the violence from the settlers and the Israeli Army. The reason why I started filming was because all the time I saw bulldozers entering our communities and destroying homes,” Adra told the UN.
“I wanted the world to know that we live in this land, that we exist, and to see what we face on daily basis, under this brutal occupation,” the director said.
The film depicts events like bulldozers demolishing houses and a school, as well as the provocations by Israeli settlers on Palestinian residents — including those which escalate to violence.
After a prolonged legal battle, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in 2022 in favor of the Israeli army, allowing the expulsion of residents from eight villages in the region.
“Even after winning the Oscar, we went back to the same reality,” Adra said, adding that the situation was “only changing from worse to worse.”
“Almost every day, there is settlers attacks on Masafer Yatta and all over communities across the West Bank,” Adra continued.
Last week, Adra’s co-director and fellow Palestinian Hamdan Ballal was attacked by Israeli settlers for winning the Oscar, and said he was detained by Israeli police for “hurling rocks” at which point he suffered a beating and “brutality.”
Rights groups have said that since the start of the situation in Gaza — a separate Palestinian territory — there has been a spike in attacks by Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
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Occupied by Israel since 1967, the West Bank is home to around three million Palestinians, as well as nearly half a million Israelis who live in settlements that are illegal under international law.
No Other Land, despite winning a prestigious Oscar, has struggled to find distribution in the United States, screening at only a handful of cinemas.