‘I was afraid for my life’ – at the scene of attack on Palestinian Oscar winner

Three weeks ago, Palestinian film-maker Hamdan Ballal stood in front of the world’s cameras in Hollywood, picking up an Oscar for best documentary film.
The cameras were watching him again on Tuesday, a hand to his bruised face, as he walked awkwardly away in bloodstained clothes after almost 24 hours in Israeli detention.
The night before, he told reporters who had gathered outside, “settlers and soldiers [were] attacking my home”. They started “beating me and threaten me with the guns”, he added, in quotes reported by news agency AP. The soldiers, he said, shot three times in the air.
In detention – where he said he was blindfolded and held beneath a cold air conditioner – soldiers joked about him being an Oscar winner.
Just a short while earlier, outside the hilltop farmhouse he shares with his wife and children, a grey family car sits on flattened, slashed tyres, with its windows smashed and wipers torn off.

Courtesy: BBC