At the Academy Awards earlier this month, Palestinian filmmaker Hamdan Ballal was honored with his co-directors for their documentary “No Other Land,” chronicling the Israeli government’s destruction and takeover of Palestinian land in the West Bank. The same night, his village was the site of an attack by settlers.

In the weeks since, settlers have continued to return to his village, Khirbet Susya in the Masafer Yatta region, south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank. And on Monday, Ballal warned his family to stay inside their home then stepped out to confront a band of settlers who had started to harass other villagers just as families began to gather for iftar, according to activists with the Center for Jewish Nonviolence who responded to the incident and interviewed relatives.

The settlers struck him in the head and stomach with clubs and rocks, then went on to attack another home, destroying water tanks and stealing security cameras, according to activists.

“He had sent his family inside when the settlers approached — he sent them inside to keep them safe, and then he went outside to scare them off, or to send them away — that’s when he got attacked,” said Raviv Rose, an activist with the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, who lives in the neighboring village of Um al-Khair and responded to the attack on Monday.

Ballal was subsequently arrested by the Israeli soldiers who pulled him from an ambulance, along with two other Palestinian residents of Susya, Khaled Mohammad Shanran and Nasser Shreteh, peace activists said. The three men were taken to a military base in Susya where they were held overnight and expected to face interrogations Tuesday morning, the men’s attorneys had told activists.

“This is not an isolated thing — the scale of attacks is ongoing.”

News of Ballal’s arrest spread quickly, with much of the focus on the fact the award-winning filmmaker was the victim of the very violence his documentary depicts. The attack on Susya marks the latest incident in a long pattern of

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