Oscar-winning Palestinian director Basel Adra says Israeli soldiers raided his home in West Bank

Israeli soldiers conducted a raid on Saturday at the West Bank home of Basel Adra, one of the directors of Oscar-winning film No Other Land, the Palestinian filmmaker confirmed himself.

Adra said soldiers had asked his wife, Suha, for his whereabouts and proceeded to search through her phone, adding that their nine-month-old daughter was home at the time of the raid.

Earlier on Saturday, Israeli settlers attacked his village, injuring two of Adra’s brothers and one cousin, the director told press agency The Associated Press (AP). Adra had accompanied his family members to the hospital, where he found out Israeli soldiers had stormed his home.

No Other Land, a joint Palestinian-Israeli production directed by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, chronicles the struggle by residents to stop the Israeli military from destroying the occupied West Bank's Masafer Yatta, and the gradual expulsion of its community.

Adra has dedicated his career as a journalist and filmmaker chronicling settler violence in Masafer Yatta. He described Saturday’s event as “horrific.”

“Even if you are just filming the settlers, the army comes and chases you, searches your house,” he said. “The whole system is built to attack us, to terrify us, to make us very scared.”

“What happened today in his village, we’ve seen this dynamic again and again, where the Israeli settlers brutally attack a Palestinian village and later on the army comes, and attacks the Palestinians,” co-director Yuval Abraham said.

The West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza have been under Israeli military occupation since 1967, following the Mideast war. Since then, Israel has built well over 100 settlements, home to more than 500,000 Israeli settlers.

Palestinians seek all three to be part of an independent Palestinian state and view the continued expansion of Israeli settlements as a major obstacle to a two-state solution. Currently, around three million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank live under what seems to be open-ended Israeli military rule, with only limited parts of the territory governed by the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed an agreement to push ahead with an illegal expansion plan in the occupied West Bank that will cut across land that the Palestinians hope would form the basis of a future state.

"There will not be a Palestinian state," Netanyahu said during a visit to the Maale Adumim settlement in the West Bank on Thursday.

The Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal under international law. Last year, the International Court of Justice declared in a landmark ruling that Israel should end settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and end its occupation of those areas, as well as Gaza, as soon as possible.

Masafer Yatta

In the 1980s, the Israeli military designated Adra’s hometown, Masafer Yatta, as a live-fire training zone and ordered the expulsion of its residents, most of whom were Arab Bedouin. Despite this, roughly 1,000 residents stayed, but Israeli soldiers regularly enter the area to demolish homes, tents, water tanks and olive orchards.

Since the start of Israel's war in Gaza, which began after Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on 7 October 2023 and killing around 1,200 people, Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank during wide-scale military operations, and there has been a rise in attacks on Palestinians by Israeli settlers. There also also been an increase in Palestinian attacks on Israelis.

Upwards of 64,000 people were killed due to Israel's military operations in Gaza since the start of the war, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in the enclave.