JERUSALEM — Israeli settlers beat up one of the Palestinian co-directors of the Oscar-winning film “No Other Land” in the occupied West Bank on Monday, and he was then detained by the Israeli military, Jewish activists on the scene said.

Dozens of settlers attacked the Palestinian village of Susiya in the Masafer Yatta area, destroying property, said the activist group Center for Jewish Nonviolence.

They attacked Hamdan Ballal, one of the co- directors of the joint Palestinian-Israeli production, leaving his head bleeding, the activists said. As he was being treated in an ambulance, soldiers detained him and a second Palestinian man, the group said.

The Israeli military said it was looking into the episode but did not comment.

“We don’t know where Hamdan is because he was taken away in a blindfold,” Josh Kimelman, one of the activists at the scene, told The Associated Press.

A group of 10 to 20 masked settlers attacked him and other Jewish activists with stones and sticks, and smashed their car windows and slashed their tires. Video provided by the Center for Jewish Nonviolence showed a masked settler shoving and swinging his fists at two activists from the group in a dusty field at night. The activists rush back to their car. “Get in, get in!” one shouts, and they duck inside as the thuds of rocks being thrown can be heard. “Car window was broken,” the driver says as they drive off.

“No Other Land,” which won the Oscar this year for best documentary, chronicles the struggle by residents of Masafer Yatta to stop the Israeli military from demolishing their villages. It has two Palestinian co-directors, Ballal and Basel Adra, both residents of Masafar Yatta, and two Israeli directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.

The film has won a string of international awards, starting at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2024. It has also drawn ire in Israel and abroad, as when Miami Beach briefly proposed ending the lease of a movie theater that screened the documentary.

During the Gaza war, Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank in wide-scale military operations, and there has been a rise in settler attacks on Palestinians. There also has been a surge in Palestinian attacks on Israelis.

DeJoy resigns: The head of the beleaguered U.S. Postal Service, Louis DeJoy, resigned Monday after nearly five years in the position and following protests last weekend by postal workers concerned about the direction of the agency.

DeJoy, appointed in President Donald Trump’s first term, had said last month he planned to step down but hadn’t set a date.

Deputy Postmaster General Doug Tulino will take on the role until the Postal Service Board of Governors names a permanent replacement.

Earlier this month, DeJoy said he planned to cut 10,000 workers and billions of dollars from the U.S. Postal Service budget, and he’d do that working with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, according to a letter sent to members of Congress.

Turkish crackdown: A media union said Turkish authorities arrested several journalists at their homes in a crackdown Monday, amid growing protests over the jailing of Istanbul’s mayor, a top rival to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

A court on Sunday formally arrested Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu and ordered him jailed pending a trial on corruption charges. His detention on Wednesday sparked the largest wave of demonstrations in Turkey in more than a decade, deepening concerns over democracy and the rule of law.

The Disk-Basin-Is media workers’ union said at least eight reporters and photojournalists were detained in what it called an “attack on press freedoms and the people’s right to learn the truth.” It called for their immediate release.

The social platform X said it was objecting to multiple court orders from Turkish authorities to block more than 700 accounts, including of news organizations, journalists and political figures in Turkey.

Depardieu trial: French actor Gérard Depardieu went on trial Monday in Paris on charges of sexually assaulting two women on a set, in a case seen as a potential watershed for France’s #MeToo movement.

Depardieu, 76, is accused of having groped a 54-year-old set dresser and a 34-year-old assistant director during filming in 2021 of “The Green Shutters.” The trial is expected to last at least two days. He denies wrongdoing.

To reporters outside the courtroom, he said “I’m OK.” Inside, he told the judges he was prepared to answer the court’s questions.

His storied career has turned the trial into a test of the willingness of France and its movie industry to confront sexual violence and hold influential men accountable.

At the time of the alleged assaults, Depardieu was already under a formal rape inquiry.

In 2018, actor Charlotte Arnould accused him of raping her at his home. In August, prosecutors requested the case go to trial.

Menendez trial: Nadine Menendez and her prison-bound husband — former U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez — were “partners in crime,” a prosecutor told a jury Monday as opening statements began in her trial over allegations that they accepted bribes of cash and gold bars.

The longtime senator was convicted last year of accepting bribes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from three New Jersey businessmen. Now, a new jury will hear much of the same evidence about Nadine Menendez, 58, after her trial was postponed when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Lara Pomerantz said Nadine Menendez “did the dirty work” for the 71-year-old New Jersey Democrat, who is scheduled to report to prison in June to begin serving an 11-year sentence.

Defense attorney Barry Coburn told jurors they will have to exonerate Nadine Menendez because there will be an “absolute, utter failure of proof in this case.”

Nadine Menendez has pleaded not guilty.

Habba now prosecutor: President Donald Trump on Monday named his one-time defense attorney and current White House counselor Alina Habba to be the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey.

Habba, who turns 41 Tuesday, takes over the interim post from John Giordano, whom the president said he’s naming to be the U.S. ambassador to Namibia.

Habba said she looked forward to working with Attorney General Pam Bondi to pursue the president’s agenda.

“If you look at what happened in crime, what’s going on in Newark, what’s going on in Camden, this has been a neglected state. It is one of the most populated states for its size and it needs to stop. We’re gonna do a bang-up job,” Habba said Monday.