Awdah Hathaleen, a beloved Palestinian activist and teacher who worked on the Oscar-winning documentary film No Other Land (2024), was shot and killed by an Israeli settler on Monday in Umm al-Khair, in the Occupied West Bank.
Yuval Abaraham, an Israeli investigative journalist and co-director of No Other Land, shared a distressing video on X of a settler identified as Yinon Levi brandishing a firearm in front of a bulldozer and firing.
At one point in the video, Levi is seen pointing his gun upward and firing toward a fence. A separate X post from film co-director Basel Adra shows medical supplies scattered near a pool of blood behind a nearby fence. Hathaleen reportedly had been standing about 150 feet away from Levi at a nearby community center when he was shot in the chest, per Abrahm’s account.
Reached on X, Abraham told Hyperallergic that Hathaleen assisted the Israeli-Palestinian director collective in filming the documentary, which chronicled Palestinian mass expulsion from nearby Masafer Yatta. Abraham did not specify which scenes Hathaleen worked on.
“I can hardly believe it,” co-director Adra, the film’s main subject, wrote on X. “My dear friend Awdah was slaughtered this evening. He was standing in front of the community center in his village when a settler fired a bullet that pierced his chest and took his life. This is how Israel erases us — one life at a time.”
Levi has a notorious history of engaging in settler violence against Palestinians. He was one of the initial four Israeli settlers sanctioned by the United States last year under the Biden administration. President Trump has since repealed those restrictions, however, which included visa bans. The State Department accused Levi of regularly leading groups of settlers to assault Palestinians and Bedouins and making threats of further violence unless they left their homes. Israeli police arrested Levi following this week’s attack, but he was later released on house arrest.
In March, Palestinian film co-director Hamdan Ballal was beaten by Israeli settlers and subsequently arrested by Israeli soldiers.
No Other Land generated impressive accolades in the film festival circuit, securing the Oscar award for best feature-length documentary. During their Oscar acceptance speech, the film’s four directors called to “stop injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.” Despite its critical acclaim, the film does not have a US distributor.
