The urgent ethics and emotional burden behind retelling the death of Hind Rajab through cinema

When Hind Under Siege screened at the Leeds Palestine Film Festival on 30 November, it came as part of a programme shaped by urgency and cultural resistance.

The festival, which ran from 12 November to 6 December, is a rare platform in the UK where Palestinian filmmakers can present new work while Israel's genocidal war on Gaza continues to define much of their storytelling.

Among the films shown this year, Hind Under Siege drew particular attention for revisiting one of the most documented and devastating incidents of that onslaught — the final hours of six-year-old Hind Rajab.

On 29 January 2024, Hind was trapped inside a car in Gaza City's Tel al Hawa neighbourhood after Israeli tank fire killed her family. For three hours, she remained on the phone with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, speaking to emergency worker Rana Al-Faqih while rescue teams tried and failed to reach her. The two paramedics dispatched to save her were also killed.

Six days later, Hind's body was recovered. Her last call travelled across the world as audio evidence of a child's terror and of a rescue that could not be carried out.

The short film, directed by Naji Salameh and written by Aida Amircani, focuses on that phone call not through a visual reconstruction of the scene in Gaza but through the emotional weight carried by Rana, portrayed by Sofia Asir.

The production was made in collaboration with Hind's mother, Wesam Rajab, and with input from the Red Crescent workers involved.

Hind Under Siege is not the only recent cinematic retelling of Hind's story.

Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania's feature-length work The Voice of Hind Rajab has also garnered international attention, including winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.

That film blends archival audio of the real emergency call with re-enactments from the Red Crescent dispatch centre.

Together, the two films mark a striking moment in which different artists have independently chosen to return to the same event, offering distinct creative approaches to a shared historical trauma.

A story that demanded to be told

For Aida, the impulse to return to Hind Rajab's final hours did not emerge slowly. It arrived as an immediate obligation, a feeling that the story demanded a cinematic response before it was swallowed by the speed of the news cycle.

"From the very first moment, Hind Rajab's story shook our conscience and ignited our moral responsibility, just as it disturbed the conscience of the world," she tells The New Arab. 

"This was not merely a tragic incident; it was the deliberate targeting of an innocent child, a brutal manifestation of systematic violence inflicted upon the most vulnerable. Remaining silent was never an option."

For her, narrative cinema offered a way to hold and transmit the truth with a depth that factual reporting alone could not reach.

"We chose narrative cinema because it is our weapon of truth and resistance, a language that transcends borders, confronts denial, and preserves memory," she said.

The film rebuilds the emotional landscape of Hind's final hours without departing from what is known to have happened.

"This was not done for spectacle, but for testimony," Aida adds. 

"We revealed layers of humanity and horror that could not be captured by audio recordings alone, while remaining deeply committed to accuracy and ethical representation. We believe cinema has the power to challenge dominant narratives, expose injustice, and awaken societies to realities they are often conditioned to ignore."

Aida views the film as part of a wider creative movement taking shape across Palestinian cinema.

Rather than waiting for temporal distance or historical closure, artists are choosing to document the war as it unfolds, preserving individual stories that might otherwise be lost or reduced to data points.

In that sense, Hind's story becomes part of a broader effort to safeguard the human experiences behind the headlines and to ensure that the voices of children caught in the war remain present and heard.

Ethics at the centre of filmmaking

Given the proximity of the event and the depth of the trauma surrounding it, the filmmakers approached the story with a heightened sense of responsibility.

The team understood that they were entering a space still defined by grief, where every decision carried moral weight and where the line between artistic interpretation and lived pain had to be navigated with care.

"This was not a story we had the right to tell without the consent, voices, and participation of those directly affected," Aida says. Engagement with the family and Red Crescent workers shaped the narrative from the outset, and their approval was essential.

"We did not treat this tragedy as material for artistic exploitation, but as a lived trauma that demanded care, consent, and integrity. Every scene was developed with sensitivity to their pain and with full awareness that this is a wound that has not yet healed," she continues. 

"Our guiding principle was dignity over dramatisation," she adds. Although told through dramatic methods rather than documentary techniques, the film avoids sensationalising violence. This approach shaped the visual language, especially when working with the child actress portraying Hind.

"We chose symbolic and suggestive visual language rather than graphic or violent imagery," Aida explained. 

The perspective of those who listened

By focusing on emergency worker Rana's viewpoint, the film redirects attention to the emotional burden carried by the people on the other end of the line.

Aida explains how central Rana's testimony was to shaping the narrative. "She expressed, with heartbreaking honesty, her anguish, grief, and overwhelming sense of helplessness as she listened to a child pleading for help while knowing she could do nothing to save her," she says.

"These complex emotions were carefully translated on screen through the performance of actress Sophie Al-Assir, who embodied Rana's psychological state with striking authenticity, to the point where the boundary between portrayal and reality seemed to dissolve."

According to Aida, the portrayal reached a depth "to the point where the boundary between portrayal and reality seemed to dissolve".

Rana's experience, she says, "became a bridge between the horror on the ground and the conscience of the world, reinforcing the film's role as testimony, resistance, and collective memory."

Cinema as evidence, memory and resistance

For Aida, the purpose of Hind Under Siege extends beyond its narrative structure. She sees the film as both testimony and documentation, a cultural intervention created at a moment when Palestinian stories are under threat of erasure.

The film, she says, "serves as a living document exposing the brutality, inhumanity, and profound moral collapse in the treatment of civilians, especially children, under occupation".

She considers its circulation essential to countering distortion and denial, describing the work as "an artistic testimony" whose impact lies in its widespread sharing.

"Its circulation means the circulation of truth," she explains, positioning the film as a corrective to the media landscape surrounding Gaza. She stresses that mainstream outlets often obscure or compress the realities of civilian life under bombardment, and that narrative cinema offers a way to resist this flattening.

This is also why Hind's story has drawn more than one filmmaker. The existence of multiple works, including Kaouther Ben Hania's The Voice of Hind Rajab, reflects the depth of its resonance.

Each film approaches the same events through a distinct creative route, yet all respond to a single moment that exposed the enduring vulnerability of Palestinian children.

Through these parallel cinematic efforts, Hind's final hours have become a touchstone for artists seeking to challenge silence and assert the importance of memory.

Rather than waiting for the war to conclude, filmmakers are actively documenting its human toll as it unfolds. In that sense, the films serve not only as cultural artefacts but as records of a present that risks being forgotten or misrepresented.

By returning insistently to one child's voice, they create a space in which Hind is neither reduced to a symbol nor lost to the pace of the news cycle.

A growing demand for Palestinian storytelling

This expanding body of Palestinian cinema meets an audience that is increasingly seeking direct, unfiltered narratives from Gaza, the West Bank and the wider region.

The Leeds Palestine Film Festival has witnessed this shift first-hand. Co-director Frances Bernstein notes that demand has surged far beyond expectations, with screenings routinely filling to capacity.

"Over the 11 years of this festival, we have proven there is a vast appetite for Palestinian cinema. Consistently, our events sell out, and we have had to move to larger venues to meet the heightened interest driven by the ongoing genocide," she tells The New Arab.

For Frances, the draw lies in the humanity of the stories being told. She argues that films like Hind Under Siege and Very Small Dreams — a 2025 Palestinian documentary about women in Gaza — "provide an antidote to dehumanisation", offering a closeness that traditional reporting cannot.

Audiences, she says, are turning to cinema to understand Palestinians not as abstractions but as "human beings with the same needs and desires as the viewer".

She points to other festival screenings, such as Women, Film and Resistance, which drew near capacity crowds in a 140-seat venue, as evidence that viewers are seeking narratives that challenge familiar political framings.

The festival's partnerships with mainstream cultural institutions are designed to bring these stories to wider audiences and, as Frances puts it, "leave them with a deeper understanding and a desire to take action".

Sarah Khalil is a senior journalist at The New Arab