A Palestinian director of the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land” was beaten bloody near his home by Israeli settlers and detained by the Israeli authorities in the occupied West Bank on Monday evening, witnesses said.

The director, Hamdan Ballal, was set upon in Susya, his home village, by at least 20 masked people, mostly teenagers armed with rocks, sticks and knives, according to Joseph Kaplan Weinger, 26, who said he had come upon the attack after it began. Mr. Weinger is part of a volunteer initiative that provides protection in areas vulnerable to settler violence.

It was not clear what prompted the attack, but Mr. Weinger, who is also a doctoral student in sociology at the University of California in Los Angeles, said the group had descended on Susya, which is south of Hebron, and assaulted West Bank residents as they were breaking the fast during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan. Some mockingly shouted holiday blessings as they did so, he said.

Mr. Weinger said that he began honking the car horn in an attempt to alert nearby Israeli soldiers to the attack, but that the Israeli forces prevented him and two companions from reaching Mr. Ballal’s home.

“Soldiers just stood around,” he said. “Later, when we got there, we saw his blood on the ground.”

Mr. Ballal, 37, was one of three Palestinians detained, according to witnesses and the Israeli military. Leah Zemel, a lawyer representing the detainees, said that she had been informed that they were being held in a military center for medical treatment ahead of questioning, but that she did not know the reason for their detention.

The Israeli military said in a statement that “several terrorists” had hurled rocks at Israeli citizens, damaging their vehicles near Susya and prompting a “violent confrontation” that involved “mutual rock hurling between Palestinians and Israelis.” The military said that when its forces and the police arrived, “terrorists” threw rocks at them.

Three Palestinians suspected of hurling rocks, as well as an Israeli civilian, were detained “for further questioning by the Israel Police,” the statement said. An Israeli was injured and was transported to receive medical treatment, it said.

The assault on Mr. Ballal came as the Israeli military has been conducting intense raids in the West Bank, in what it says is an effort to crack down on militant groups. Since January, the operation, focused on the northern West Bank, has forced more than 40,000 Palestinians to flee their homes— the biggest displacement of civilians in the territory since the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, historians say.

Mr. Ballal was among four directors — the others were Basel Adra, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham — in a Palestinian-Israeli collective that picked up the Academy Award for best documentary this month. The film documents the demolition of West Bank residents’ homes in or near the village of Masafer Yatta, where Mr. Adra is from, by Israeli forces claiming the area for a live-fire military training ground.

The documentary captured the destruction between 2019 and 2023 and in archival footage. It was released last year amid Israeli expansion of West Bank settlements, which have been encouraged by the far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. With the expansion has come a documented rise in Jewish settler violence against Palestinians, according to the United Nations agency for humanitarian coordination, which tracks violent episodes in the area.

Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, reported that settlers had stormed Masafer Yatta hours before the directors won their Oscar.

Susya has also been in a protracted legal battle with the Israeli government over plans for its destruction and moves to remove residents in an area that Israel has deemed an archaeological site.

Mr. Weinger, who has spent the past several months in the South Hebron Hills, said that during Ramadan, attacks in the area have become increasingly frequent. “Nearly every day, there’s something,” he said.

Mr. Adra, the other Palestinian director of the film, said on social media that he arrived in Susya shortly after the violence broke out Monday evening to see masked assailants hurling stones. Israeli soldiers then arrived, but rather than arresting the attackers, he said, they pointed their rifles at the Palestinians and began to head in their direction.

Mr. Adra said he scattered with others from the scene, and later saw soldiers taking Mr. Ballal away.

Chase Carter, a spokesman for the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, which connects Jewish activists with Palestinians in the West Bank for documentation and human rights work, said that five Jewish American activists who went to the scene to document the attack were assaulted by settlers. The settlers used rocks to smash the car with the activists inside, he said.

On social media, Mr. Adra recalled that it was only a few weeks ago that he, Mr. Ballal, and the Israeli creators of the film were being feted at the Oscars.

“But we always knew we’d have to return to this reality as, unfortunately, the world isn’t helping to end the occupation,” he said.

Alissa Wilkinson, Aaron Boxerman and Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting.

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal in a landmark climate case brought by 21 young people against the federal government, ending its 10-year journey through the courts.

But the case provided a blueprint for numerous other climate-related lawsuits that have had greater success.

Juliana v. United States argued that the government had violated the constitutional rights of the plaintiffs with policies that encouraged the use of fossil fuels. But it was dismissed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, where the judges ruled that courts were not the right venue to address climate change.

“Rather, the plaintiffs’ impressive case for redress must be presented to the political branches of government,” Judge Andrew D. Hurwitz wrote in the 2020 opinion.

Our Children’s Trust, the Eugene, Ore., nonprofit law firm that represents the plaintiffs, made its final legal gambit in the case last year, when it asked the Supreme Court to vacate the appeals-court ruling and allow Juliana to proceed to trial in a lower court. That petition was denied on Monday.

Some observers had also considered it risky to ask the Supreme Court to consider the appeal, out of concern that a conservative court might use the case to jettison longstanding environmental protections.

The plaintiff the case is named for, Kelsey Cascadia Rose Juliana, now 29 and a teacher in Oregon, is the daughter of environmentalists and a longtime climate activist herself. The story of how she came to participate in the lawsuit was chronicled in the documentary “Youth v. Gov.”

The legal framework of Juliana has since been replicated in numerous lawsuits and legal actions across the country. And last year, Our Children’s Trust, which has filed many of the cases, scored two notable wins.

The group reached a settlement in Navahine v. Hawaii Department of Transportation in which the state agreed to cut emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas warming the planet, from its transportation system within 20 years. And it won Held v. Montana, in which a judge ruled that the state must consider climate change when approving fossil fuel projects. An appeals court upheld that decision in December.

The plaintiff that case is named for, Rikki Held, 23, grew up on a cattle ranch in Montana where she saw the effects of climate change firsthand, which led to her decision to participate in the lawsuit. She is now a science educator in Kenya through the Peace Corps.

On Monday, she said that the Juliana case had paved the way for her. “Juliana, through the unwavering dedication of its plaintiffs and legal team, has left an indelible mark on the landscape of climate litigation,” she said.

Julia Olson, the founder of Our Children’s Trust, had called on the Biden administration to discuss a settlement in the Juliana case, pointing to expressions of support from lawmakers and academics. She said on Monday that Juliana had “ignited a legal movement.”

But lawyers for the Justice Department had maintained that the court was not the right setting to address climate change, because a judge could not order or enforce any “workable remedy” to the problem.

And some experts had raised concerns about the organization’s strategy at the Supreme Court, noting the risk that the court’s conservative supermajority might take the Juliana case as a way to reconsider legal precedents that undergird environmental protections.

“Be careful what you ask for from this court,” said Patrick Parenteau, an expert on environmental law at Vermont Law and Graduate School, in an interview last year. “If you want an answer to this question, you probably will not like the answer you’re going to get.”

But he added that he still applauded the efforts of the young people and their lawyers.

Ms. Olson said environmentalists should not shy away from the courts. “If we don’t show up and we don’t bring claims forward, and we don’t shine light on injustice, then other forces will always prevail,” she said.

Andre Lee bought a used Kia Forte to boost his career as an insurance agent in Singapore. In his mind, he saw himself zipping across town in his black coupe, impressing potential clients.

“It’s the same as being dressed in formal wear with leather shoes, or wearing a Rolex,” Mr. Lee, 33, said of the two-door car he bought in 2020.

Mr. Lee paid $24,000 for the 2010 model, about five times what the car would have been listed for in the United States. Why the markup?

Singapore, an island city-state that is smaller than New York City, charges drivers thousands of dollars just for the right to buy a vehicle. The price of the permits, which were introduced in 1990 to limit pollution and congestion, rises with a car’s value.

The price Mr. Lee paid for his car, including the permit, was on the cheaper side. Some drivers pay as much $84,000 for the 10-year document, known as a certificate of entitlement.

“I know of people who treat their vehicles better than their family because it costs more to maintain a car than a family sometimes,” Mr. Lee said. (His own family lent him money for the Kia.)

There is little reason for many Singaporeans to own a car. Most residents rely on an expanding and affordable public transportation system that stretches across the island. Even long journeys cost less than 2.50 Singapore dollars, or about $2, and ride-hailing platforms such as Grab are plentiful.

Still, twice a month, aspiring car-owners and dealers bid for a fixed number of permits determined by the Singaporean authorities.

The country’s decades-long campaign to limit car ownership has worked: There are about 11 passenger vehicles per 100 people there, well below an estimated 82 cars and trucks in the United States and 67 in Italy.

Singapore is not the first to tax cars as part of efforts to tackle pollution and traffic. In 1989, Mexico City started regulating how many cars circulate daily. London and Stockholm later introduced congestion pricing. New York City followed this year, becoming the first in the United States to do so.

But none of those cities charge drivers as much to own a car.

The most expensive permit in Singapore rose about 18 percent to more than $84,000 in March from a year earlier. But rising costs don’t appear to have deterred sales. The government raised $4.86 billion from permit sales in the 2024 fiscal year, almost 40 percent more than it had estimated.

For the wealthiest residents of Singapore, which is home to a rising number of billionaires, shelling out tens of thousands of dollars for a car permit is not a big deal.

Su-Sanne Ching, who runs an import-export business, bought a Mercedes-Benz sedan so she could drive herself and her parents around. The permit alone cost her $60,000, raising the overall price to about $150,000. (A similar model in the United States would have run her $48,450.)

“I am paying the price for convenience,” she said.

But for the middle class, especially those who have children, the rising cost of the permit forces a difficult choice.

Joy Fang and her husband bought a used Hyundai Avante in 2022 for $58,000, including the permit, to ferry their two children to school and day care. The price of the car — nearly twice the pre-permit price of a new model of that sedan — makes her pause.

“It’s definitely not worth it when you weigh the cost against how often we actually use it,” she said. Each month the couple pays about $1,400, or more than 10 percent of their household budget, for the car, the permit, and other expenses like road taxes, fuel and parking. To offset the cost, they cut back on eating out and traveling.

But the thought of juggling a stroller, two children and assorted bags on public transportation makes her blanch.

“Honestly, I feel like we’re caught in a bind,” she said.

Confronted with the alternative of becoming more like Jakarta or Bangkok, other Southeast Asian cities that are regularly choked with traffic, Singaporeans prefer quieter roads, said Chua Beng Huat, a professor of sociology at the National University of Singapore.

“We’re not sitting in traffic for two or three hours just to get to work,” he said. Having an efficient public transport system also makes it easier for Singaporeans to not use a car, and he takes it himself when he needs to go downtown.

But he still has a BYD SUV that he uses to take his grandchildren around town.

For other car owners, the math sometimes gets too hard to justify. Mr. Lee, the insurance agent, sold his Kia three years after he bought it. The costs of maintenance, parking and fuel were piling up, and he wasn’t convinced that it had translated to more business.

These days, Mr. Lee mostly takes public transport. If he needs to meet a client, he borrows his father’s Nissan Qashqai.

“I had other priorities, and didn’t see the car being top of the list,” he said.

President Trump’s plans to send representatives to Greenland this week have angered political leaders on the island territory, who see the group’s visit as an aggressive escalation of his threats to seize the area, by force if necessary.

Mr. Trump has made no secret of his designs on Greenland, repeating his threats to acquire the territory through a financial transaction or military force several times since his return to the Oval Office. To date, the response of Greenland’s leaders has been polite but firmly opposed, stating it was not for sale.

But this week’s visits from Usha Vance, the second lady, and Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, have elicited a more agitated response. Prime Minister Mute Bourup Egede told Sermitsiaq, a local newspaper, that their expected arrival, little more than two weeks after Greenland held parliamentary elections, is “highly aggressive,” and “the only purpose is to demonstrate power over us.”

He also said he feared that the visit would drum up fervor in the United States for a takeover of Greenland, “and the pressure will increase after the visit.”

So why is Mr. Trump so determined to have Greenland? Here’s a window into his thinking.

Greenland is in strategically important territory.

Most of Greenland lies within the Arctic Circle, a region that the world’s powers are vying for over for its untapped natural resources and its proximity to emerging shipping corridors that would accelerate global trade. Already, melting Arctic ice has transformed the region that was once largely unnavigable into an area of competitive commerce, as more ships traverse the Arctic Circle and countries with land in the region scramble to lay claim to as much of the seabed as possible.

Routes between Asia and Europe, or Asia and the United States, are about 40 percent shorter through the Arctic than either the Suez or Panama Canals, according to the U.S. Naval Institute. That makes the question of who controls the seas there critical for both financial and security purposes, especially given the claimants also happen to be rival geopolitical superpowers.

Only five countries can claim to have an extended continental shelf into the Arctic: Canada, Russia, Norway, Denmark via Greenland, and the United States via Alaska. Acquiring Greenland would give the United States a significantly bigger claim in the Arctic.

Trump has said it is vital for national security.

“We need Greenland for national security and even international security,” Mr. Trump said in March during an address to Congress, adding the territory was “very, very important for military security.”

The United States has had troops in Greenland since World War II, and keeps a small missile defense base there called Pituffik Space Base — formerly Thule Air Base, before Mr. Trump redesignated it during his first administration. It is possible that base could become part of the “Golden Dome” missile defense system, modeled after Israel’s Iron Dome system, that Mr. Trump has said he wants to build to protect the entirety of the United States from potential threats from adversaries, especially China. In an executive order, Mr. Trump gave Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, until March 28 to produce the plans for that missile defense shield.

But there are market-based threats Mr. Trump wants to protect against as well. Russia and China are already cooperating on Arctic shipping routes, and with Russia’s extensive presence in the region — it has the largest area of Arctic coastline — that partnership threatens to remain the dominant economic force in the area.

Greenland could be a rich source for rare earth minerals and energy.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the Arctic holds 13 percent of undiscovered gas resources and 30 percent of undiscovered natural gas, most of it offshore. Controlling Greenland would give the United States an expanded claim to those seabed resources.

But Greenland also uniquely boasts huge stores of rare earth minerals that are vital to the production of batteries, cellphones, electric vehicles and other technology — and the Trump administration has been looking globally to augment its rare earth mineral holdings.

Rare earth minerals have been a key part of an agreement that the United States has been trying to strike with Ukraine. Greenland’s stores of cobalt, nickel, copper, lithium, zirconium and other minerals have proven challenging to mine, but there is another incentive for the United States to seek to control that market: China.

Currently, China dominates the world’s raw mineral market, and has already attempted to make inroads in Greenland. Acquiring the territory would allow Mr. Trump to check Beijing’s efforts to exploit minerals there and expand America’s holdings.

Climate change could soon make Greenland a hot commodity.

Part of the reason it has been difficult to exploit Greenland’s resources to date is that it is so darn cold. But with climate change, melting ice is creating new opportunities for resource exploitation. In the last 30 years, about 11,000 square miles of ice sheet have melted, an area about the size of Maryland.

Denmark has also recognized the potential of Greenland’s resources to be vital in the global transition to greener forms of energy. For the local population, the potential for an economic boom from mining is seen as helpful in its bid for independence, which a majority of the population wants.

But the development of the industry has been slow. Greenland has taken steps to limit the potential for environmentally destructive mining practices through laws, including a ban on uranium mining in 2021. But those could be overturned if the United States acquires the territory.

The United States has lifted multimillion-dollar bounties on three senior Taliban officials, according to Afghan authorities and a senior American official, a significant shift by the Trump administration toward some of the most blood-soaked jihadists from the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.

The move comes days after a U.S. hostage envoy, Adam Boehler, made the first visit by a high-ranking American diplomat to Kabul, the Afghan capital, since the Taliban seized power in 2021. His talks with Taliban representatives led to the release of an American citizen who had been detained in Afghanistan for more than two years.

Many Taliban officials saw the meeting in Kabul and the subsequent lifting of the bounties as a major victory for a government that was almost completely shut out by the United States during the Biden administration. The steps also put fresh momentum behind less hard-line Taliban voices who have been engaged in an internal power struggle, pushing for their government to moderate its policies to gain wider acceptance on the world stage.

Mr. Haqqani, his brother Abdul Azizi Haqqani and a cousin, Yahya Haqqani, no longer appear on the State Department’s Rewards for Justice website. The bounty was removed on Monday from the F.B.I.’s wanted poster for Sirajuddin Haqqani.

A spokesman for the Taliban’s Ministry of Interior Affairs, Abdul Mateen Qani, said that “a deal with the U.S. was finalized” to lift the bounties, after the issue was discussed multiple times with American officials.

“This is a major achievement for the Islamic Emirate,” he added, referring to the Taliban government.

The American official who confirmed the bounty removals spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. The Trump administration, including in a January social media post by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has made clear that it could reimpose or increase bounties on Taliban leaders if additional Americans held in Afghanistan are not released.

The meeting on Thursday in Kabul between Trump administration and Taliban officials followed initially tense indirect interactions by the two sides. In January, President Trump demanded that the Taliban return $7 billion in American military hardware left in Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal. He threatened to cut all financial aid to the country if it was not returned.

The Taliban authorities rejected the notion, noting that the equipment had been crucial in keeping the Islamic State affiliate in the region at bay, according to two Afghan officials with knowledge of the matter.

Since the Taliban seized power, the United States has led the charge in isolating their government, which has imposed the most draconian restrictions on women in the world. Biden administration officials stressed that the United States would not ease any sanctions until those restrictions were lifted.

But as the Taliban, led by an ultraconservative cleric, Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada, made clear that they would not bow to outside pressure, the United States became an outlier in its firm approach.

While no country officially recognizes the Taliban as the lawful authorities in Afghanistan, more countries in the region and in Europe have appeared to accept the limits of their influence and engage on issues on which they can find common ground.

“The Taliban has developed a proclivity to do transactional diplomacy, quid pro quo deals,” said Ibraheem Bahiss, an International Crisis Group consultant. The lifting of the U.S. bounties showed that the release of the American held in Afghanistan “was somehow reciprocated with some good will or that a transactional deal had been struck.”

It is also a notable change in American policy toward Sirajuddin Haqqani, an ambitious political operator who embraced suicide attacks like few other Taliban leaders and was responsible for the bloodiest attacks during the U.S.-led war.

In 2011, Mr. Haqqani’s men launched a 19-hour-long assault on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. In 2017, his network was behind a truck bombing that killed more than 150 people, mostly civilians.

Over the past three years, Mr. Haqqani has sought to remake his image and engage with the West through back channels. He appears to be trying to win foreign backing that could help him as he tries to negotiate with Sheikh Haibatullah over the Taliban’s most controversial policies, including the restrictions on women.

In January, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court requested arrest warrants for Sheikh Haibatullah and the country’s chief justice for their “unprecedented” persecution of women and girls.

“This is a victory for the engagement camp within the Taliban,” Mr. Bahiss said of the lifting of the bounties. More moderate figures “can go back to hard-liners and say this is the kind of reciprocity we can get for the compromises we are advocating for.”

Adam Goldman and Safiullah Padshah contributed reporting.