Palestinian activist behind No Other Land killed by West Bank settler
Awdah Hathaleen, a Palestinian activist and journalist who contributed to the Oscar-winning 2024 documentary No Other Land, was killed Monday in an attack by Israeli settlers. Captured footage of the attack appears to show Israeli settler Yinon Levi, who had previously been put under sanctions by Joe Biden before they were removed by Donald Trump, firing his gun indiscriminately during the attack. He was later arrested by Israeli police for questioning, though no charges were filed against him, The Guardian reports.
Residents of the village of Umm al-Khair in the West Bank, where the attack took place, reported that Hathaleen was killed after a settler drove a bulldozer onto their land, destroying trees and property. When an activist approached the driver to ask them to stop, the driver allegedly knocked him down with the bulldozer’s blade. Other residents responded by throwing stones, during which Levi allegedly entered the fray and began shooting. The Guardian reports that Hathaleen was standing a distance away, but was struck by a bullet.
“I can hardly believe it. My dear friend Awdah was slaughtered this evening,” Basel Adra, No Other Land‘s Palestinian co-director, shared on social media. “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.” Adra also shared footage of the attack, reiterating that Levi is currently “sanctioned by 9 countries (now 8, because of Trump).” Yuval Abraham, the documentary’s Israeli co-director, also shared the video, calling Hathaleen “a remarkable activist.”
Last month, Hathaleen and his cousin Eid al-Hathaleen attempted to fly to the U.S. for a series of planned talks but had their entry denied and their visas revoked at the San Francisco International Airport. “Just a few weeks ago, Awdah attempted to come to San Francisco to build bridges between cultures—to share a message of peace. He had come to raise summer camp funds to help give Palestinian children experiencing the unthinkable a semblance of a childhood back home,” San Francisco supervisor Bilal Mahmood, who previously protested the visa revocation, wrote in a statement on X on Monday. “Now we’ve learned he has been murdered. This is an absolute tragedy, and must be condemned. Sadly, it is just one more example of the human toll brought on by the Israeli government’s occupation of Palestine.”
Just last week, Hathaleen wrote of the destruction of his village in an article for independent Israeli-Palestinian publication +972. “The demolition forces enter the village. All the children run to their mothers, who scramble to salvage whatever they can from their homes before it’s too late. Everyone watches on anxiously to see who will be made homeless today. The bulldozers gather in the center of the village and then stop. Soldiers disembark. The villagers look each other in the eye, searching for words of comfort, but there are none. Our children ask us why this is happening, but we have no answers,” he wrote. “Amid all of this injustice, we often feel forgotten, lost, or hopeless. Sometimes we wonder: why do Israelis see us as terrorists and enemies? Why is the world not acting to achieve justice for Palestinians? But most of the time, we feel tired. The attacks, the raids, the demolitions: we think about them all the time. I always say that I wish fate hadn’t brought us to this point. But now we are stuck here; there’s no way to leave.”
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