‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’: Can it be a turning point in our global conscience?

The Voice of Hind Rajab, a docu-drama by Kaouther Ben Hania chronicling the tragic final hours of the six-year-old in Gaza who died in IDF firing — alone and scared, still hoping to be rescued with her family dead around her in the car — premiered at the Venice Film Festival to an unprecedented 23-minute standing ovation on 3 September, Wednesday.

The emotionally charged screening saw several attendees weep in sorrow and anger, amidst chants of “Free, Free Palestine” and waving red-black-green-white flags. Moments from the screening have gone viral, capturing global attention.

While some have been cynical about the 11th-hour onboarding of Brad Pitt, Jonathan Glazer, Alfonso Cuaron, Plan B ‘executive producers’ Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara, it certainly did the job of getting more visibility for the Gazan feature — and yes, for the veteran Hollywood stars themselves.

But at the heart of the film is Palestinian truth, unvarnished, not Hollywood gloss.

The documentary uses authentic audio from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, highlighting in particular the little girl’s desperate, frightened pleas for help over the radio — all alone, in a car filled with dead family members.

“Please come to me, please come. I’m scared,” the child is heard sobbing in the despatch of 29 January 2024, with bullets firing in the background.

The child’s body was eventually found lifeless, days after her last call went out — in February 2024 — and became a lightning rod that galvanised international public opinion that had already been shifting in favour of at least the children of Gaza, trapped and assaulted for no fault of their own.

Macklemore’s was one of the first artistic tributes to the slain little girl, his composition for Hind Rajab — ‘Hind’s Hall’ — becoming an anthem of sorts at pro-Palestine, anti-Israel demonstrations (including US universities before POTUS Donald Trump’s crackdown), the soundtrack to many a reel and carousel on Gaza.

And the final killing of Hind Rajab (and her fourth cousin present, 14-year-old Layan, who had also survived the first firing), rather than the rescue a whole world was waiting for — as though for absolution for its sins in letting Israel continue its devastating ‘self-defence’ against Hamas — became a watershed moment, a burden hard for even the most hardened anti-militancy heart to set down.

That shared guilt is what lends so much weight to this feature today — and not just the sorrow for, the fear echoing from that tiny desperate voice, doomed to a terrifying death.

And yet, what has that guilt achieved, besides being memorialised in art, in music, in content that does credit to its creators — but avails little for the children of Gaza, for the state of Palestine?

The first ambulance despatched to rescue Hind Rajab in January 2024 was ‘lost’ almost immediately. The next would, effectively, arrive too late. It would be 12 days before the bodies of the two medics would be found... near the bullet-riddled car that held the carcasses of Hind’s aunt, uncle, three cousins — and the little girl herself.

But what did knowing this, spotlighting any of it change on the ground?

The IDF has continued to target civilians — including medical personnel and media personnel, aid workers and children — with impunity still.

More than 1.5 years later, a recent report from UN-allied experts on disability has told us of some 40,500 Gazan children injured in Israel’s ‘war on Hamas’ since 7 October 2023 — of whom half have been left disabled, in a context where 80 per cent of people with disabilities (of any age, a total population of 90,000) no longer have any access to the assistive devices and accommodations they need.

More than 18,000 children had been killed in Gaza by early August alone.

Kaouther Ben Hania, the Franco-Tunisian director of Voice of Hind Rajab, told reporters that the narrative in the mainstream media continues to be that those dying in Gaza even now are but “collateral damage” in a worthy cause — the right of self-defence and self-determination for Israel, which it was promised post-Holocaust in the ‘never again’.

For the rights of Palestine — as a people or as a state — remain non-existent, at best paid lip service to.

“And I think this is so dehumanising, and that’s why cinema, art and every kind of expression is very important to give those people a voice and face,” Ben Hania, a two-time Oscar nominee, continued. (Now she can expect another nomination, with The Voice of Hind Rajab being Tunisia’s chosen entry.)

So yes, it is important. But still, what does it avail? Will Hind Rajab’s post-humous voice, heard a year-and-a-half after her death change the world’s stance on the rights of Palestine to not just ‘protection’ under international law — which, the limits thereof no one seems able or willing to impose on Israel — but to self-defence and self-determination of its own?

Will it help people accept that the militancy of a Hamas — and sure, hostage taking is always heinous — is but the right of the people against an occupying, colonising, genocidal power?

And while hostage taking is heinous, will hearing from Hind Rajab help us see Israel’s imprisonment and targeting of generations of Palestinian children is wrong? Is arguably a bigger problem than the Israeli hostages — out of sheer numbers, if nothing else, though the greater weight surely should belong to Israel’s Zionist policies and the politics underlying it, as well as the West’s guilty disavowal of responsibility for a problem that European colonisers and racists created in the first place, when creating Israel?

As one of the (part-)Palestinian actors who play the Red Crescent first responders — Palestinian-Canadian Saja Kilani — said on behalf of the team, “Enough of the mass killing, starvation, dehumanisation, destruction and the ongoing occupation.

“The Voice of Hind Rajab does not need our defence. This film is not an opinion or a fantasy… Hind’s story carries the weight of an entire people. Her voice is one amongst tens of thousands of children that were killed in Gaza in the last two years alone.

“It is the voice of every daughter and every son with a right to live, to dream, to exist with dignity.”

Will this voice get heard — loud enough to change the trajectory of Gaza’s fate, now pushed to its extreme amid famine and an expanded assault on its last remaining, functional urban space, Gaza City?

Will the fact that Hind’s pleading little voice still rings in her surviving mother’s ears make a difference to our collective conscience?

For Wissam Hamadah, Hind’s mother, still lives. Her voice was in the actual first responders’ ears too, as they updated her on the ambulance’s approach — before it too was cut off by a tank. And that mother’s voice has informed this film, since it was to her that Ben Hania first looked in taking up this project — and uncovered stories of a child who loved the sea, who wanted to grow up and be a dentist one.

And Hamadah has no hope of justice for her child, not really. It seems too much to ask that we, the rest of the world, prove her wrong.

“They killed her twice,” Hamadah had told an NBC news crew on the ground in Gaza when Hind’s body was found. “This is her weapon, a crown that she was wearing,” she showed them. 

“I hope I see you in heaven, my baby” — this was all the hope Hamadah could muster.

So, is there hope that the world, 1.5 years too late, will recall the 335 bullet holes in the car she sat in, and finally say ‘enough’ to Israel?