Hearing a Voice from Genocide

Frann Michel

The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025)
Director: Kaouther Ben Hania
Producer: Nadim Cheikhroua, Odessa Rae, James Wilson

THE VOICE OF Hind Rajab dramatizes the experience of workers at the Palestine Red Crescent Center who spoke with the five-year-old Palestinian girl of the title. She was the child who spent hours trapped in a car with her dead family members who were killed by Israeli troops as they tried to obey evacuation orders.

It’s an inevitably moving film, telling a familiar story from a less-familiar angle. As a film about work, it emphasizes the importance of labor that is genuinely useful as well as the pain of workers burdened by impossible responsibilities.

After the Israeli army finally approved a safe route for an ambulance to drive the eight minutes into the evacuation zone to rescue her, the Israeli army nonetheless killed Hind Rajab and the two ambulance workers, leaving their bodies in their charred vehicles.

The Israeli government initially denied its responsibility and subsequently deferred further comment.

Hind was one of at least 16,800 Palestinian children killed in Israeli attacks between October 7, 2023 and her death in late January 2024. But the detailed story of the end of a single life can cut through the numbness induced by the barrage of numbers and the bland bureaucratese of mainstream media.

A nonprofit organization, the March 30 Movement, named their legal branch the Hind Rajab Foundation; it has been pursuing international legal action against Israeli military crimes. Students protesting the genocide and their university’s complicity renamed Columbia’s Hamilton Hall for her, and rapper Macklemore titled a song about the genocide and protests “Hind’s Hall.”

Investigations of visual evidence by the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, Al-Jazeera, the Washington Post, and Sky News, as well as auditory evidence by the London-based group Forensic Architecture, confirm that the 335 shots that killed Hind and her family were fired by weapons the United States supplies, and that the Israeli tank responsible would have been close enough for its occupants to see the civilians in the car: two adults and five children.

Call Center Workers’ Trauma

The last one of these alive was Hind, who spent her final hours on the phone with Palestine Red Crescent workers in Ramallah, begging them to send someone to rescue her. Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s docudrama, The Voice of Hind Rajab, portrays the experience of the call center workers, using the actual audio of Hind’s voice.

In focusing on the workers, Ben Hania not only restricts the story to documented events, but also highlights the emotional and psychological labor of care, the moral injury inflicted on workers trying to save lives and ameliorate suffering in a genocide, and the conflicts that arise among the workers divided in their responses.

Psychologist Nisreen (Clara Khoury) takes her turns on the phone with Hind, but her first role is clearly to counsel those answering the phones. As they process their frustrations, we hear Rana (Saja Kilani) reminisce about a case in which they were able to save lives, and we see Omar (Motaz Malhees) rail at their supervisor for not doing more.

Frustrated at the delay involved in waiting for the Israeli authorities to provide an approved safe route for the ambulance, Omar castigates Mahdi (Amer Hlehel) for not simply sending an ambulance without permission, telling him that Hind’s death will be his fault.

Mahdi points to an image of many Red Crescent workers already killed by Israel, quietly insisting he must do all he can to prevent more of their deaths. Most viewers will already know that this scrupulous rule-following was in vain, perhaps sympathizing with both sides of the impossible debate, and recognizing the dangerous impulse to lash out at allies over the effects of shared oppression.

As the workers wait for Israeli approval to send an ambulance, they do what they can to comfort Hind and each other, weeping and listening, praying with Hind, asking her to talk about happier times. She rejects their attempts to obscure the reality of her situation: her relatives in the car are not sleeping; she knows they are dead.

Mounting Horror

There have been a number of criticisms of the film. Some have suggested that the melodrama of the call-center workers is overacted, that the bland claustrophobia of the call center offers too little visually, or that the use of the actual audio of Hind’s voice is exploitative.

While the emotional reaction of Omar, who takes the initial call, seems surprisingly swift — one imagines these workers would have developed some psychological defenses for coping with the stresses of this job — the mounting horror of the unfolding situation soon catches up with the reactions we see.

The glass walls and fluorescent lights of the setting seem to me an effective counter­weight to the unseen violence of Gaza, which is visually familiar from news stories and resounds through the audio of the calls. The mobile camera of cinematographer Juan Sarmiento G. provides engagement as well as a you-are-there sense of urgency.

Visually self-reflexive gestures remind us we are watching a fictional recreation of real events: at some points, for instance, we see the actors listening to the voices of their factual counterparts.

Near the end of the film we see smartphone footage of the workers, held before the blurred re-enactors, as though what we see on the phones is being recorded at that moment, yet also reminding us that this happened before and is being enacted again. These framings and reframings call attention to the questions of how to tell such stories.

A number of documentaries have reported on these killings and the investigations into them, including Al Jazeera’s The Night Won’t End (2024, discussed in Against the Current 235). Two other dramatic films, also released in 2025, portray these events. The shorts Close Your Eyes Hind (dir. Naji Salameh, 2025) and Hind Under Siege (dir. Amir Zaza, 2025) both expand the time frame somewhat to include scenes of Hind’s life. The latter also includes audio of Hind’s voice.

Hind’s mother, Wesam Rajab Hamada, has approved use of the audio as part of attempts to raise awareness and pursue justice for Palestine. The alternative of having a child play the role of Hind seems potentially exploitative in a different way.

How to Tell the Story

As for the decision to tell this story at all, I confess I went into the film concerned that it would replicate the “suffering victim” tradition that, as film scholar Brian Winston noted, has troubled documentary cinema since the work of the influential British documentarian John Grierson. Hearing about the 23-minute ovation at the Venice Film Festival did not allay my concerns, since the approbation of an affluent and aesthetically-minded audience hardly promises hard-hitting revolutionary content.

But while those concerns were to some extent borne out, the film is more interesting than I expected even while being as compelling as I feared. Its cultural prominence means it is well positioned to reach broad audiences, and potentially useful as a tool for bringing people together.

Certainly it is both unfair and an index of wider inequities that a girl child is an especially sympathetic victim. No one of any age or gender deserves what Israel is inflicting on Palestinians.

Certainly the glaring horrors of this incident should not be taken to minimize other moments in the long-term violence, injustice, and cruelty of the occupation and genocide. And certainly there are dangers to stories that enlist sympathy by attending to victims rather than winning allies by attending to those pursuing justice.

The question of attention raises another criticism — that the film’s focus on the Red Crescent workers constitutes a distraction from the central story of Hind and her family. Prathyush Parasuraman in The Hindu objects both that the film treats Hind “not as a girl but a symbol,” and that the focus on the workers “is a horrifying choice because it displaces her urgency with their impatience.”

But the adults who seek to help are, after all, not unconnected to stories of resistance and survival in the face of Israel’s colonization and brutalization of Palestine.

Mohammad Aaquib, in Middle East Monitor, argues that the idea that the film is raising awareness rings hollow, since not only is the plight of Palestinians already well known, but also the “production company, Plan B, which financed the film, is majority-owned by Mediawan, a billion-dollar French private equity company with ties to Zionist shareholders.

“In other words, any profit that the film makes will flow back into the very networks of capital that support Israel’s ongoing crimes. This is not solidarity — it is tokenism wrapped in self-righteous aesthetics.”

There may well be some unmerited conscience-soothing among audience members, and certainly the question of who profits financially from the film is vexed and consequential: as capital consolidation increases, the sources of financing become ever more limited and compromised.

If there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, no more is there purity in production, yet there may be better and worse strategies for producing and distributing media.

But the idea that awareness has already been raised as much as possible seems doubtful, and persistent attention to the genocide continues to provide an avenue for political pressure.

In March, Variety reported that India’s Central Board of Film Certification told the film’s distributor that the film would not be shown there because its release “would break up the India-Israel relationship.” Attempts to suppress cultural works hardly guarantee their merit, but should provide a signal about their power.

Several groups around the United States and Europe have used screenings of the film as occasions to raise funds, expand awareness, and develop organizing strategies in support and solidarity with Palestinians. The site lists many possible films for such screenings, worth exploring, but The Voice of Hind Rajab is a skillfully-made docudrama, worth hearing.

May-June 2026, ATC 242