On the afternoon of January 29, 2024, call handlers from humanitarian aid organisation the Palestine Red Crescent Society were connected with someone in urgent need of help. Over a crackling line through their headsets came the small, desperate, confused voice of a child\u2014a five-year-old girl called Hind Rajab\u2014pleading with someone to come and get her. She and six members of her family\u2014her uncle, aunt, and four young cousins\u2014had been driving through Gaza City, evacuating from the west to the north under a call from the IDF, when their car came under fire. All but Hind were killed. \u201cThey\u2019re dead,\u201d she cried down the line. \u201cI\u2019m so scared, please come.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the next three and a half hours, the Red Crescent\u2019s Rana, and her colleagues, kept Hind on the phone as she hid inside the vehicle from nearby Israeli tanks, pressed up against the bodies of her four cousins, while the team frantically tried to secure and coordinate safe passage for an ambulance to rescue her. \u201cStay with me,\u201d a terrified Hind said over and again. \u201cCome get me.\u201d To keep her on the phone, they asked her questions: what class was she in at school? (\u201cButterfly.\u201d) They prayed with her. When Hind\u2019s life began to fade, they tried to comfort her with breathing exercises until, eventually, as night fell, their prompts were met with silence from the other end of the line.<\/p>\n
It took 12 days for Hind\u2019s body\u2014and those of her family\u2014to be retrieved from the car; in the footwell lay a crumpled page from what appeared to be a coloring book. Just meters away from the bullet-ridden vehicle was the ambulance, now just a burnt-out shell. Having finally been dispatched, it had been attacked as it approached Hind\u2019s vehicle. Inside were the remains of the two paramedics sent to save her.<\/p>\n
Kaouther Ben Hania was in an airport, busy on the Oscar campaign trail for her last film, 2023\u2019s Four Daughters (nominated in the best documentary feature film category), when she first heard the harrowing recording of Hind \u201cbegging for her life\u201d on the internet, after the Red Crescent uploaded the audio to social media, immortalizing Hind\u2019s voice as a haunting emblem of the war. So \u201cimmediate\u201d were the pleas that came through Ben Hania\u2019s own headphones that \u201cfor a millisecond\u201d she thought Hind was speaking directly to her. \u201cI thought she was asking me to save her,\u201d recalls the 48-year-old Tunisian director today, from her apartment near Fontainebleau, a scenic town just outside Paris that\u2019s famous for its forest. Her green surroundings \u201chelp me a lot to think,\u201d she says, smiling, her dark eyes sparkling. \u201cI moved here for this.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the afternoon of January 29, 2024, call handlers from humanitarian aid organisation the Palestine Red Crescent Society…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":187551,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[6613,42,43,108255,5099,40,38,41,39,10051],"class_list":{"0":"post-187550","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-digital_syndication","9":"tag-headlines","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-storytypereporting-story","12":"tag-textaboveleftsmall","13":"tag-top-news","14":"tag-top-stories","15":"tag-topnews","16":"tag-topstories","17":"tag-tv-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187550\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/187551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}