The Israeli Army ordered the evacuation of the Tel Al-Hawa neighborhood in Gaza on January 29, 2024. While trying to leave, six members of the Hamada family, along with their six-year-old niece, Hind Rajab, were trapped in their car by a gas station when the army opened fire on them. Before she died, one girl managed to phone her uncle in Germany to get help from the Red Crescent. Left in the car among the corpses of her relatives was six-year-old Hind.
Fifty miles away in Ramallah, the office of the Red Crescent phoned the car and talked with Hind on her cell phone. This docudrama recreates their efforts to get an ambulance to rescue the girl. An ambulance is only eight minutes away, but the Red Crescent workers have to “coordinate” the rescue with the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, a unit in Israel’s Ministry of Defence. First, they need to establish a safe route through an area under siege and then get the green light to proceed. This takes hours.
Omar (Motaz Malhees) is the first emergency center responder to talk with Hind. He becomes very upset by what is happening and frustrated that the coordination effort by Mahdi (Amer Hlehel) is taking so long. They have to follow the rules, Mahdi insists, to ensure the safety of the ambulance team, Youssef Zaino and Ahmed Madhoun; many first responders have already been killed by the Israelis. Omar has to be calmed down by his supervisor Rana (Saja Kilani) and Nisreen (Clara Khoury), a counselor in the center. All of the workers struggle to control their emotions, lest they further alarm Hind and to maintain a professional stance with the bureaucrats.
Director Kaouther Ben Hania keeps the camera focused on what is happening in the emergency center. We never see the Hamada car until the postscript to the film when we learn it was riddled with 355 bullets.
But creating an unprecedented authenticity for the rescue mission, the director uses recordings of Hind’s actual voice. She fills the screen with the audio waveform of Hind's voice. We hear her announce that she is all alone, that all her family is dead. It is getting dark, and she is scared. “Come get me,” she pleads over and over again. At one point, she suggests that Rana have her husband drive her to pick her up, but Rana is helpless to respond. She does ask the little girl if she would like to pray, and then line by line they say the “Fatiha” – Rana first, then Hind repeating the words, which are obviously familiar to her. This is the prayer said by Muslims all around the world.
This story went viral on the Internet as pictures of Hind and accounts of her situation were posted on social media. But to no avail. The ambulance was within a block of her car when it was fired upon and destroyed by the Israeli army, both responders killed. Hind’s voice disappeared at 7:30 pm.
This is what genocide looks like. Watch and weep.