Key Takeaways:
- Cinema is turning disputed events into fixed “history”: Oscar-shortlisted Palestinian films present contested claims as settled fact, stripping away context and responsibility to create permanent false memory.
- Media praise has replaced scrutiny: despite unresolved questions, The Voice of Hind Rajab has been treated as moral testimony rather than a narrative that demands critical examination.
- A new genre is taking shape – with lasting consequences: by framing Gaza through the moral language of historical atrocity, these films risk cementing distortions that will outlive the war itself.
The Oscar-nominated film The Voice of Hind Rajab, directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, is significant for reasons that go far beyond awards-season prestige.
It marks the emergence of a new cinematic genre – one that seeks to position Palestinian wartime narratives alongside, and morally on par with, Holocaust cinema. If that sounds like an overstatement, the film itself explains why it is not.
This is not simply a dramatization of a tragic death. It is a template. And if it succeeds, it will not remain an outlier.
Tragedy Is Not the Dispute. Exploitation Is.
Before addressing the film itself, one point must be stated plainly: the death of six-year-old Hind Rajab was a tragedy. No political position, no military analysis, no critique of media framing negates that basic human fact.
But tragedy does not grant unlimited creative license.
When a film opens with the claim that it is “based on real events,” it assumes an ethical obligation to treat those events with rigor, especially when the film’s clear purpose is moral indictment rather than private mourning. Emotional power does not absolve factual responsibility. If anything, it heightens it.
That obligation is precisely where The Voice of Hind Rajab fails.
A War Without a Battlefield
After its opening disclaimer, the film transports viewers not to Gaza, but to Ramallah, in the West Bank — where it remains for its entire runtime.
The story unfolds almost exclusively inside the offices of the Palestinian Red Crescent. We watch call-center workers field frantic phone calls, coordinate (or fail to coordinate) a rescue, argue with superiors, break down, rage, despair. The emotional arc is tight, immersive, and deliberately claustrophobic.
What we never see is Gaza itself.
We do not see the battlefield conditions. We do not see the neighborhood Hind’s family was fleeing. We do not see Israeli forces, Hamas operatives, tunnels, crossfire, evacuations, or warnings. We are not shown the circumstances that turned a civilian escape into a deadly encounter.
This absence is not accidental. It is the film’s governing choice.
By removing the story entirely from the physical and military context in which it occurred, the film achieves narrative purity at the cost of reality. The war becomes an abstraction. Violence becomes intent. And responsibility becomes singular.
Disputed Facts, Fixed Conclusions
This critique does not seek to relitigate every detail of the Rajab case. But it is impossible to ignore that key aspects of the incident remain disputed, and that those disputes have been systematically flattened into certainty by activists, NGOs, and — now — cinema.
Independent analyst Mark Zlochin has documented multiple unresolved inconsistencies in the evolving accounts of the incident, including:
- Visibility and battlefield conditions: Reconstructions routinely ignore the combined effects of low-visibility weather, plastic sheeting covering the car windows, and the vehicle’s movement northward — against Israeli evacuation instructions. These factors materially affect whether those inside the car could have been clearly identified as civilians.
- Shifting descriptions of the event: Early accounts described a moving vehicle under fire — a scenario consistent with misidentification in combat conditions. Later versions quietly recast the scene as a stationary car, eliminating ambiguity and reframing the encounter as a deliberate attack.
- Omitted communications: Arabic WhatsApp screenshots referenced in English-language investigations include messages noting that family members exited the vehicle and later reported another child’s death – messages absent from English narration and subsequent coverage.
- Forensic Architecture’s contested analysis: The modeling relied entirely on a disputed audio recording which, even taken at face value, suggests multiple weapon types and contradictory sound signatures, which are indicators of crossfire rather than a single, intentional volley.
- Unexplained timeline gaps: Later reconstructions introduce a gap of more than six hours between the alleged start of the incident and the first documented contact with emergency services — a gap no investigation has adequately addressed.
Further Reading: Media Overlook Terror Supporters Behind the Hind Rajab Foundation
All together, these discrepancies point not to a settled atrocity, but to a chaotic battlefield encounter clouded by poor visibility, uncertainty, and combat pressure. Acknowledging that complexity does not diminish the human loss. It restores factual integrity to an event that has been steadily transformed into a moral parable.
How Dehumanization Works on Screen
One word recurs throughout the dramatization: they.
“They killed her.”
“They will kill her.”
“We can’t move without them.”
Israelis are never named. Israeli soldiers are never shown. Israel exists only as a faceless, voiceless presence – an unseen force of pure evil.
By contrast, Palestinian Red Crescent workers are rendered with exquisite emotional detail. Their fear, anger, and exhaustion are lingered over in extended close-ups. Their humanity is undeniable; humanity that is constructed in direct opposition to the erasure of Israeli personhood.
This is not subtle. It is foundational to the film’s moral architecture.
The effect is not merely to humanize Palestinians – something no honest viewer objects to – but to dehumanize Israelis as a category, stripping them of motive, context, or internal constraint. The audience is not invited to understand what is happening. It is instructed whom to blame.
A War With One Side Removed
Hamas is never mentioned in the film. Not once. And this omission is not a neutral choice, but a narrative necessity.
The story cannot sustain moral clarity if viewers are reminded that the war in Gaza began with Hamas’s invasion of Israel, the murder of civilians, and the abduction of hostages – many of whom were still being held at the time of the incident. It cannot tolerate reminders that Hamas embeds itself in civilian infrastructure and operates from dense urban areas it knows will become battlefields.
At one point, a Red Crescent supervisor explains that ambulances cannot move freely because they risk being fired upon. The implication is clear: the enemy is so cruel it targets rescue vehicles.
What viewers are not told is why such coordination protocols exist – namely, Hamas’s documented practice of using emergency vehicles for terrorist purposes. Remove that fact, and procedure becomes cruelty. Context becomes atrocity.
The Purpose of the Frame
Why is the entire film set in Ramallah?
Because Ramallah is not Gaza.
Because from Ramallah, war can be imagined without combatants. Violence can be presented without causation. Tragedy can be severed from the events that precipitated it.
The result is a cinematically compelling, morally streamlined narrative: a faceless aggressor waging war on the most defenseless of victims, untethered from the realities of October 7, from two years of urban warfare, or from the terror organization that initiated and sustained the conflict.
This is not documentary filmmaking. It is myth-making. And it is precisely how a genre is born.
Setting the Stage for Award Glory
The film’s appearance on the Academy Awards shortlist for Best International Feature Film came as little surprise. And in a shortlist of just five titles, its inclusion further reinforces the point: two of the films are centered around Palestinians. The other is Palestine 36, directed by Annemarie Jacir — a sweeping historical drama set during the Arab revolt of the 1930s that has been widely criticized for historical distortion, including in a detailed takedown published by The Free Press.
“Creative licence,” it seems, stretches comfortably across decades.
That The Voice of Hind Rajab would be rewarded during awards season was predictable not because of its artistic daring, but because of the machinery assembled around it. For a film competing in a non-major category, it has received a disproportionate volume of media attention: glowing reviews, sympathetic director interviews, and repeated festival spotlights. This is publicity money cannot buy – and did not need to.
What is striking is not the praise itself, but the absence of scrutiny.
Review after review lauds the film’s emotional power – particularly its use of the real audio recordings of Hind Rajab’s final calls while declining to interrogate the factual disputes surrounding the case, including the documented inconsistencies identified by independent analysts. Nor do critics meaningfully engage with how the film reduces a complex war to a single moral dimension: a faceless enemy, acting with unambiguous intent, against helpless civilians.
Flattening War Into Myth
The more difficult film to make – the braver one – would have resisted that flattening. It would have situated Hind Rajab’s death within the full horror of the war that preceded it: a conflict ignited by Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians; a prolonged campaign against a terror group embedded in dense urban areas; a battlefield where civilians, including children, were trapped in conditions no filmmaker could render without confronting uncomfortable truths.
Such a film would not absolve anyone of tragedy. It would deepen it.
But that is not the film audiences are offered.
Instead, reviewers reinforce the same moral framing the film constructs. Sky News described the film as depicting an “avoidable tragedy,” explaining that it allows audiences to experience “the complex Israeli protocols Palestinians have to live by.” The implication is clear: bureaucracy, not war; malice, not circumstance.
In The Guardian, an interview with director Ben Hania placed Rajab’s death within what it described as “the global impassivity that has surrounded two years of slaughter in Gaza.” Impassivity? Israel has been accused of genocide, subjected to diplomatic isolation campaigns, seen universities shut down by protest, and watched pro-terror marches sweep European capitals. To call this “impassivity” is not serious analysis.
In The Washington Post, a review titled “How a Gazan child’s desperate phone call inspired a must-see movie” uncritically amplified the director’s claim that Rajab’s death represented a “tipping point” in a genocide – a claim presented as emotional truth rather than an assertion requiring evidence. The article noted approvingly that the film screened at the United Nations and for members of Congress, as if institutional endorsement were proof of historical accuracy.
The genocide allegation has become settled fact in coverage of Hind Rajab’s death – not because it has been proven, but because it has been repeated.
From Cinema to False Memory
The film has been hailed as one of the “most harrowing cinematic experiences of the year,” praised for its supposed “ideological neutrality,” and presented – by Christiane Amanpour – as “history.”
That last claim matters most.
It is not filmmakers alone who are constructing this new canon. Journalists are paving the way for it. In The Telegraph, critic Robbie Collin compares The Voice of Hind Rajab to The Zone of Interest, describing Jonathan Glazer’s Auschwitz-set film as a “masterpiece” and suggesting that Ben Hania’s work is underpinned by the same “calm artistic rigour that transcends shock value.” The comparison stops short of declaring equivalence, but nonetheless places a Gaza war drama in dialogue with Holocaust cinema.
This is how false memory is formed.
Film is one of the most powerful tools for shaping historical consciousness. Filmmakers can always retreat behind artistic discretion. When the IDF is depicted as sadistic and indifferent, it can be dismissed as interpretation. When Israelis are rendered faceless, it is defended as symbolism.
But when journalism anoints such films as “history,” it does something more enduring: it commits a version of the war to cultural memory that future audiences will mistake for truth.
There will be more films like The Voice of Hind Rajab. More works like Palestine 36. Not only Gaza, but Israel’s entire past, will be re-imagined through this lens – a process that does not merely criticize a state, but delegitimizes its very existence.
And once committed to the big screen, those myths will be far harder to dismantle.
Liked this article? Follow HonestReporting on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to see even more posts and videos debunking news bias and smears, as well as other content explaining what’s really going on in Israel and the region. Get updates direct to your phone. Join our WhatsApp and Telegram channels!
