For two years, Palestinians living in Gaza have documented their own annihilation, as Israel has killed well over 67,000 people, including at least/ 20,000 children, in what is widely considered a genocide. Yet Western media have routinely denied and even justified this carnage, reinforcing the dehumanisation of Palestinians. Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s docufiction film, The Voice of Hind Rajab, seeks to subvert this dehumanisation by zooming in on one story: the killing of the titular five-year-old Palestinian girl. 

On January 29, 2024, Hind Rajab was in the car with six members of her family, all of them civilians, fleeing their neighbourhood to escape Israeli assault. Israeli tanks fired at their vehicle. Hind, who survived the initial attack and was trapped in the car with the bodies of her relatives, made a distress call to the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), begging to be rescued. 

The Voice of Hind Rajab combines real recordings of phone calls with dramatised reenactments from the PRCS office to recreate the events of that day. The entire film hinges on the real, unadulterated voice of Hind through those phone conversations, memorialising it as a part of public testimony. “I’m so scared, please come,” she says repeatedly. “Please call someone to come and take me.”

Over the 89-minute run-time, Ben Hania forces viewers to bear witness to the gruelling wait of more than three hours that Hind endured in the car for help to arrive, as well as the immense bureaucratic hurdles the PRCS workers faced in their attempt to help her. Unlike social media, here, we cannot scroll, swipe, or switch off. 

The Voice of Hind Rajab focuses its gaze squarely on the PRCS workers, Rana Hassan Faqih (Saja Kilani), Nisreen Jeries Qawas (Clara Khoury), Omar A. Alqam (Motaz Malhees), and Mahdi M. Aljamal (Amer Hlehel). Ben Hania doesn’t exceptionalise the murder of Hind and her family as an isolated act of brutality. Instead, she situates it within the wider Israeli assault on Gaza and the systemic conditions Israel has created.

The film opens with the PRCS team in Ramallah, West Bank, taking a break, some smoking cigarettes, shortly before the phone call arrives. From the moment Hind calls, we are told that the PRCS ambulance is just an eight-minute drive away from her, highlighting the cruel absurdity that it takes over three hours to secure permission to reach her. The permission comes from the Israeli Defence Forces via a circuitous route that involves a lot of bureaucracy in between. The Voice of Hind Rajab foregrounds the logistical challenges faced by the PRCS team: how their hands are tied every step of the way, and the Israeli forces make it impossible for them to do their job and support civilians in Gaza. 

Mahdi is the senior member tasked with the difficult job of enforcing protocol, refusing to deploy the ambulance until they secure permission. He comes off as the most inured to the genocide. But Hlehel superbly captures the tension between his impulse to rescue and his responsibility towards his team. In one scene, he points to the pictures of all the killed PRCS workers, explaining to the more impulsive Omar that those people also had families and whole lives and that he could not put another one of his people in danger (Israel has killed 51 PRCS staff and volunteers so far). 

Omar, meanwhile, is driven by anger and despair. He initially receives the call from Hind’s 15-year-old cousin, Layan, who says, “They are firing at us; the tank is beside me,” only to go quiet minutes later. From then on, Omar remains shaken and singularly invested in saving Hind at any cost. He lashes out at Mehdi several times and desperately looks for ways to bypass protocol and send a rescue team. Malhees powerfully renders Omar’s helplessness and rage against this injustice. 

For most of the phone calls, however, Rana holds fort talking to Hind, as the team quickly realises the little girl feels more comfortable talking to her. Rana must compartmentalise her inexplicable grief while talking to Hind, centering Hind’s feelings throughout. At one point, when Hind is in unbearable pain and feeling scared, Rana asks her to close her eyes and recite the Dua with her. These are the most poignant scenes of The Voice of Hind Rajab, portraying Palestinian resilience, hope, and faith in the face of unspeakable horror.

Cinematographer Juan Sarmiento G. uses close-ups to create a sense of intimacy with the PRCS staff and convey a sense of claustrophobia, while the handheld camera amplifies the chaos of the situation. The editing by Qutaiba Barhamji, Maxime Mathis, and Ben Hania further heightens the tension, alternating between fast cuts to create suspense and long takes to make us feel the length of time and the frustration of the workers through the ordeal. 

The film’s final act gives us a false victory when, after three gruelling hours, permission is finally secured and the ambulance finally arrives. For a moment, we can feel the relief in Mahdi, Omar, Rana, and Nisreen’s eyes; all their effort, all the pain, feels worth it if they can save Hind. Then they lose contact with the paramedics, and the film cuts to black before showing footage from 12 days later of the severely damaged car and ambulance blown up. 

The film concludes with a clip from when Hind was alive. On-screen text tells us that an Israeli tank fired 335 rounds at the vehicle, a harrowing fact to deal with. "I hope this film will help stop this destructive war and save the other children of Gaza," said Hind’s mother, Wissam Hamada, who couldn’t even watch it before it was released and remains in Gaza City. 

The Voice of Hind Rajab is undeniably compelling, urgent, and sobering. It effectively depicts the tragedy with honesty and sensitivity without resorting to histrionics or graphic imagery, framing what happened to Hind as a metonym for the brutal genocide in Gaza.

Kaashif Hajee is Assistant Culture Editor at The Polis Project.

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