At the family home of Palestinian filmmaker and farmer Hamdan Ballal in the South Hebron Hills, a lingering dust storm shrouds the view of a nearby Israeli settlement that has been encroaching on the people of his community, Masafer Yatta, for so long.
Almost a year ago, Mr Ballal and his co-directors won Palestine’s first Oscar for the documentary No Other Land, which spread word across the globe of Israeli land grabs and attacks in the area.
That attention was not enough to stop Mr Ballal from being attacked shortly after he returned from Los Angeles by the same settlers he had documented – in this case, a man called Shem Tov Lusky. Last week, Lusky led another attack on Mr Ballal’s family. Four relatives were arrested and one was taken to hospital.
“This is not life. They block you in. They control you,” Mr Ballal said as Israeli fighter jets roared over the occupied West Bank, the land blooming in the first days of spring.
Yellow flowers were pushing through the ground as he pointed in the direction of the attack. This is the time of year when the South Hebron Hills look their best and most colourful, but the mood in his house was bleak, as the family processed the particularly brutal attack that left them fearing for the life of one of their own.
“During the attack my brother was squeezed by the neck very hard. He struggled to breathe and turned blue. When my nephews saw this they were terrified – they thought he would die. They took him very quickly to hospital. He was in a bad way when he got there. He couldn’t breathe,” Mr Ballal said.
Halfway through the conversation, Hamdan’s brother, Mohammed Mohammed Ballal, a victim of the attack, drove up the valley in a battered silver car and parked next to a female relative making fresh laban, a type of fermented yoghurt.
Mr Ballal said that fear for the lives of his family is grounded in the trauma of the death of his friend Odeh Hadalin last summer. The well-known activist was killed by a settler in broad daylight in Masafer Yatta.
The terror persists despite an Israeli court ruling two weeks ago that the area around Mr Ballal’s house must be closed to non-residents. He reported that settlers, who come with their own flocks, break that rule almost every day and that Israeli authorities do nothing when they call to protest about the incursions. They say the court decision has actually increased attacks.
“All Palestinians have hope that one day they’ll get their freedom. After the genocide in Gaza and what’s happening here in the West Bank, with no one able to do anything to help on the ground, I really see the future as something very black,” Mr Ballal told The National.
His assessment comes during a month in which Israel’s far-right government has made moves that many fear could pave the way for full annexation of the West Bank, despite international opposition to such a step.
On Monday, Peace Now, an anti-settler group, accused Israel of moving to expand the borders of Jerusalem for the first time since 1967, which it said would amount to “annexation through the back door”. It would be a massive escalation in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. East Jerusalem is supposed to form the capital of a Palestinian state under the Oslo Accords, which remain the preferred route to ending the Israel-Palestine conflict for most of the international community.
A day earlier, the government approved a plan to allow land registration in the West Bank for the first time since 1967, which gives Israeli authorities power to irreversibly determine ownership of land in the Palestinian territory.
And last week, the government unveiled measures to make it easier for Israelis to buy Palestinian land in the West Bank and for the state to exercise more control over sensitive religious sites instead of Palestinian authorities – including in Hebron, the West Bank’s most populous city, which was dimly visible through the dust on Tuesday at Mr Ballal’s house.
The measures led to widespread condemnation from Arab and western states, who called on Israel to respect Palestinian territorial rights. The US also repeated its opposition to annexation of the West Bank.
Standing at a fulcrum of Israel’s West Bank land grabs over the years, Mr Ballal dismissed the developments, which have caused so much international concern.
“These decisions are new for you, but not for us. When you are actually on the land, you see the outposts and how much of an area they control,” he said.
The sound of Palestinian children in a playground just up the hill became clearer as the barking of the family’s dogs died down. Their shrieking and laughing did not stop even when an Israeli army pickup truck scrambled up the hill, sounding its siren.
Fully armed soldiers, their faces covered, started a patrol right by the fence of the playground. They could well have been residents of the nearby settlement. Many of the security teams of these illegal, ultranationalist communities now serve as soldiers.
The children did not seem to notice, as if to prove Mr Ballal’s point about how unremarkable this moment feels for people living the reality of what could be Israel’s approaching annexation.
