The Voice Of Hind Rajab

Bluesky

At the time of writing, at least 170,000 Palestinians have died as a result of Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip in the conflict which began in 2023. Most of their names will never be known to the world at large. They are thought of only in terms of statistics – and yet one death, as they say, is a tragedy. The death of Hind Rajab, five-years-old* and recently graduated from kindergarten, echoed around the world.

Kaouther Ben Hania has a history of taking on such difficult material, with films like Beauty And The Dogs and The Man Who Sold His Skin tackling abuse, corruption and exploitation, whilst 2023’s Four Daughters saw her blend documentary and fiction in tackling the story of a mother who lost two of her children to radicalisation and worse. Here she does something similar, telling the story of what happened to young Hind through the experiences of staff handling emergency calls. Records of the calls were logged, enabling an unusual degree of accuracy; and the voices of actors are cut together with material from recorded calls. That really is Hind – or Hanood, as she was affectionately known – posthumously participating in the film.

With the consent of her mother, who briefly appears in interview at the end and is seen identifying bodies, Hind’s words have already circulated through the mass media, but hearing or reading short excerpts is a different experience from sitting quietly and hearing almost everything in a context closely approximating the one in which it took place for real. The long pauses and the moments of confusion edited out on the news remind us, here, of what it means to be so young and in such an overwhelming situation.

The film is Tunisia’s official submission to the 2026 Oscars. That interview and archive footage recorded at the site of the incident 12 days afterwards are the only elements not set on the 29th of January, 2024, when Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PCRS) operators received a call from a German man worried about his brother’s family in Gaza City, and subsequently found themselves in contact with Hind. The operators themselves have been fictionalised to an extent, allowing for an imaginative element of drama which can depict the sort of distress caused by such experiences without directly reflecting on the real individuals involved. The effect is somewhat similar to Paul Greengrass’ United 93. It’s close enough to reality to hit hard, and rich in detail, whilst being distant enough to reflect on larger issues – in this case, inviting viewers to reflect on the trauma of actually living in the besieged Gaza Strip by way of showing us the second hand trauma of those dealing with it at one remove.

Hind and the other callers aside, there are really only four characters: Omar (Motaz Malhees), who initially takes the call; Rana (Saja Kilani) who steps in to help when he struggles to control his emotions; Nisreen (Clara Khoury), who is there to look after the mental health of the team; and their boss Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), whose job it is to keep a calm head and try to negotiate a safe path of approach to Hind for an ambulance whilst everybody else is screaming at him for being too careful and too slow. If you’re familiar with emergency centres like this, you might feel that the speed with which these characters begin to lose control is a bit unrealistic, but as dramatic characters they must also channel audience feelings, and to be have the be too removed would probably have been a mistake. Furthermore, we are watching three hours of calls condensed into half that time.

There is some very good work here, and all of it tempered where it needs to be, to give due prominence to Hind herself. Ben Hania’s film is unabashedly urgent. of the 17,000 Palestinians killed in the war to date, an estimated 20,000 have been children. Hind was just one, but here she speaks for all of them, and every one a tragedy.

*Hind gave her age as six, but birth records have since confirmed that she was just five; it’s not uncommon for children that age to get confused in anticipation of birthdays.

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