Hala is an Arabic-focused instruction and translation model family built using a translate-and-tune pipeline. It compresses a powerful AR↔EN teacher model to FP8, roughly doubling throughput (without sacrificing quality) and generating high-fidelity bilingual supervised data. Using this data, we fine-tune the lightweight language model LFM2-1.2B and translate high-quality English instruction sets into Arabic, generating a million-unit corpus tailored for instruction following. We train Hala models with 350 million, 700 million, 1.2 billion, and 9 billion parameters, applying slerp merging to balance Arabic specialization with the strengths of the baseline model. On Arabic-focused benchmarks, Hala achieves state-of-the-art results in both the "nano" (2 billion parameters or less) and "small" (7-9 billion parameters) categories, outperforming the baseline model. We are releasing the model, data, evaluation, and recipe to accelerate Arabic NLP research.