Israeli soldiers stopped international journalists from entering villages in the West Bank featured in the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, during a press tour on Monday organised by co-directors Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham.
The pair had invited more than a dozen local and international journalists to visit Adra’s home village of At-Tuwani, which lying within a collection of Bedouin villages in an area known as Masafer Yatta in the West Bank, to witness evidence of settler violence and army demolitions.
A video posted on X by Adra and Abraham shows a masked Israeli soldier telling the journalists to clear an area barred by a checkpoint in 10 minutes, threatening them with legal action if they fail to comply.
Abraham is heard saying: “You know that they are journalists. They’re coming to see the destruction in Masafer Yatta, the way that you are destroying the community, the settler violence dangerous.”
The soldier suggests the ban on the journalists crossing over into the West Bank is to maintain “order” in the area.
Adra interjects: “We’re going to my home inside. There will be no cars here. What’s your problem? They’re coming to my home in my village. Why don’t you prevent the settlers when they come to burn the homes and the cars, and attacking people? Why only for journalists who are holding cameras and phones? Why?”
A journalist’s suggestion that the group proceed on foot rather than by car is turned down with the soldier repeating the ban is for the sake of “order”, to the bewilderment of many in the group.
“In this crossroads, no journalists and no guests and no hundreds of people to keep the order in the area… right here you are a public disturbance,” he says, standing in an empty, traffic-less road.
Adra’s villages is among collection of hamlets also including Hafaweh, Mirkez, Jimba and Susya, which lie on the Palestinian West Bank side of the 1949 Green Line.
Their future has been at stake since Israel declared much of the land they are situated on a live-fire training zone in the 1980s, with their inhabitants coming under further pressure from the construction of illegal Israeli settlements on their doorstep such as Carmel and Ma’on.
No Other Land which won the Best Documentary Academy award follows the journey of Adra as he documents the devastation of wreaked on Masafer Yatta and its Bedouin community over the years, and Israeli journalist Abraham’s attempts to amplify this narrative.
The work world-premiered at 2023 Berlinale, where it won the Audience Award and Berlinale Documentary Award.
In the wake of the Oscar win, the inhabitants of the Masafer Yatta villages had hoped the award would help their cause as the documentary exposed the challenges they are facing to international audiences.
Instead, there has been an uptick in settler violence, while Israel has stepped up its plans to clear the Bedouin villages, bulldozing the village of Khalet a-Daba on May 5.
In March, just weeks after the documentary’s Oscar win, Hamdan Ballal, a co-director on the film alongside Adra, Abraham and Rachel Szor, was attacked by a mob of Israeli settlers close to his his village and then arrested by soldiers and held overnight in an army facility.
