Eyewitnesses to Palestinian clash contradicts Academy-Award winning filmmaker’s version of events
A farmer who was present at the clashes between Palestinians and Israelis in which an Academy Award-winning filmmaker was arrested contradicted media accounts of Monday night’s clash in the Hebron area.
Shem Tov Lusky at his farm in the Mount Hebron region on May 25, 2025. Photo by Anna Epshtein/TPS-IL
The eyewitness, Shem Tov Lusky, 25, is an owner of a farm near Susya, where Palestinian filmmaker Hamdan Ballal filmed “No Other Land.” The film recently won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Lusky told The Press Service of Israel that he received a phone call on Monday at around 5:45 PM from a young Jewish shepherd ambushed by a dozen masked Palestinians who were throwing stones at him. Lusky took his wife’s car, calling the police and army on his way.
“What happened yesterday is just one episode. We meet this kind of violence from the Palestinians almost on a daily basis,” Lusky said.
“When I arrived, I saw lynch. This boy was alone against a mob,” Lusky recalled to TPS-IL. “They started to throw stones at my car, all the windows were broken, and I couldn’t move forward with the car because they blocked the road. So I got out of the car and tried to hide behind it, praying the army arrives soon. It’s a miracle I got out alive from this. Huge rocks were flying over my head.”
More Jewish shepherds arrived at the scene before the army and the police, and the situation was “a total mess” as Jews and Arabs threw stones at each other.
Israeli security forces arrived, dispersed the crowd and asked Lusky to help identify the attackers who were escaping towards the home of Ballal a few hundred meters away.
Lusky and a member of the security forces who arrived at the scene both said that Ballal was among the attackers who threw stones at the shepherd. The security person spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
Both insisted that, contrary to a widely-reported statement by Hallal’s Israeli co-director Yuval Avrahami, Ballal was not injured and there was no ambulance at the scene. Avrahami claimed that Ballal “was kidnapped from the ambulance by the soldiers.”
According to Lusky, Ballal was arrested after he identified the filmmaker as one of the attackers.
Another member of the security forces who was present at the scene also confirmed to TPS-IL that there was no ambulance at the scene and that Ballas was taken to the police car by the soldiers.
That certainly puts a different light on things. It shows how one important element left out shifts the ‘facts’ to another scenario that’s incorrect. Happens a lot in Israel, with the Palestinians now expert in creating dramas for the world’s media to relish.