Ṣawt Hind Rajab
Kaouther Ben Hania (2025)
‘January 29, 2024. Red Crescent volunteers receive an emergency call. A 6-year old girl is trapped in a car under fire in Gaza, pleading for rescue. While trying to keep her on the line, they do everything they can to get an ambulance to her. Her name was Hind Rajab.’
That was the ‘official synopsis’ (Deadline.com) for Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab ahead of its world premiere at last September’s Venice Film Festival (where the film won the Grand Jury Prize). Not quite two years since the events in question, there have already been three screen accounts of what happened. A Dutch film, Close Your Eyes Hind, was the first to appear, in June 2025. A few weeks after Venice, Hind Under Siege, from Jordan, was screened at the Gaza International Festival for Women’s Cinema. Both those films were shorts and dramatised events, their casts including a child playing Hind Rajab. Kaouther Ben Hania’s version is the first feature-length treatment (89 minutes) and formally more complicated. This is a ‘docudrama’, and Ben Hania’s choice of title is important. Hind Rajab doesn’t appear on screen, other than in a few pieces of family video and photographs, but the narrative includes the real audio recording of her calls for help.
Jafar Panahi’s personal circumstances and It Was Just an Accident’s political context are always in a viewer’s mind during that film. Kaouther Ben Hania, by putting together dramatic reconstruction and distressing actuality, and telling the story in something close to real time, confronts the audience more starkly. She sets things up to suggest a standard dramatisation, introducing four workers in the Red Crescent offices in Ramallah, the administrative capital of Palestine in the central West Bank. She sketches in a very few character details for each one of these two men and two women, and their tough, grim work. Then one of them answers a phone call from a terrified girl. This initial contact is made not by Hind but by her fifteen-year-old cousin, Layan Hamadeh. She, Hind and other family members were fleeing Gaza City when an Israeli army tank opened fire on their car, killing five of the seven people in it. Layan Hamadeh’s call ends with the sound of machine-gun fire and her screams. When the Red Crescent workers phone back, Hind answers, now the only person in the car alive. In the Ramallah offices, the four workers start their urgent but, it transpires, tortuous attempts to negotiate with the Gaza Health Ministry and the Israeli military to guarantee safe passage for an ambulance crew to get to the car and rescue the little girl.
Some reviews of The Voice of Hind Rajab refer to ‘integration’ of the reconstruction of Red Crescent efforts and the voice of the terrified child (who was five, not six, pace the ‘official synopsis’). This is integration in name only. The recordings – their authenticity stressed by Ben Hania’s showing on screen the audio waveform of Hind’s voice and the recording’s digital file name – overpowers the reconstruction. To say it’s uncomfortable to hear the recordings would be a serious understatement, yet the film does provoke discomfort – with Ben Hania’s approach. The four Red Crescent staff, whose real names are used, are Omar A Alqam (Motaz Malhees), Mahdi M Aljamal (Amar Hlehel), Rana Hassan Faqih (Saja Kilani) and Nisreen Jeries Qawas (Clara Khoury). Ben Hania dramatises tensions and disagreement among them, and particularly between the two men, as to how to proceed. The arguments between impassioned, volatile Omar and Mahdi, his more cautious and conciliatory supervisor, are presumably accurate. Even so, conflicts of this kind are what a viewer expects from screen stories, fact-based or otherwise, about a team of people struggling to deal with an emergency.
The use of Hind Rajab’s own voice isn’t what you expect, and the fact that many in the film’s audience have heard it before – Hind’s calls went viral in the days after 29 January – makes little difference. All four main actors are admirable but knowing they are actors almost lets us off the hook, for as long, that is, as the foursome are interacting with each other. When they interact with the child’s voice, it’s certainly disturbing but that feeling comes from not only hearing the voice but also witnessing acted interaction with it. Omar, Mahdi, Rana and Nisreen celebrate prematurely as the ambulance approaches its destination, before phone contact with the paramedics suddenly stops with the sound of an explosion. The rescue vehicle itself was attacked by Israeli militia and the two paramedics, Yusuf al-Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun, died – but that’s not the only reason why this is another part of the narrative that’s hard to stomach. It’s virtually impossible not to stage it as a so-near-and-yet-so-far moment, familiar in suspense drama and thereby incongruent with Ben Hania’s extraordinary use of actual audio recordings.
Near the end of The Voice of Hind Rajab, the actors and their setting disappear. They’re replaced by an excerpt from a news interview with Hind Rajab’s mother, at some point between 29 January and 10 February 2024, when the child’s family, after the withdrawal of Israeli military from the area, discovered the car containing their dead relatives, including Hind. There are TV news shots of the wreckage and of bodies being recovered. The mother’s voice finally describes her daughter’s love of the sea, over video images of Hind playing on a beach. Ben Hania’s two films before this one were a drama, The Man Who Sold His Skin (2020), and a documentary, Four Daughters (2023). She might seem particularly qualified to direct docudrama, and The Voice of Hind Rajab, like its two predecessors, has been well received internationally. There’s no denying it’s powerful cinema and I don’t doubt Kaouther Ben Hania’s humanitarian reasons for making the film. I do question how she chose to make it.
16 January 2026
