{"id":350693,"date":"2025-12-15T20:08:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-15T20:08:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/350693\/"},"modified":"2025-12-15T20:08:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T20:08:07","slug":"the-voice-of-hind-rajab-review-crushing-war-crime-reenactment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/350693\/","title":{"rendered":"The Voice Of Hind Rajab review: Crushing war crime reenactment"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just 19 months after five-year-old Hind Rajab was targeted for murder by the Israeli military, her story was already set to premiere at the glitzy Venice Film Festival. The contrast of the devastating (and ongoing) atrocities committed against the Palestinian people with a high-status, opulent European red carpet event inherently provoked skepticism. Competing for the coveted Golden Lion and boasting celebrity executive producers\u2014including Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, and Rooney Mara\u2014it initially seemed like Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania\u2019s The Voice Of Hind Rajab was simply going to be a crass attempt at assuaging our collective guilt for a genocide that we have been all but helpless to stop.<\/p>\n

Yet, when watching Ben Hania\u2019s formally radical and emotionally raw reenactment of the Palestine Red Crescent Society\u2019s dogged effort to remotely rescue Hind from a car flanked by Israeli forces in Gaza, it\u2019s hard to remain cynical\u2014least of all when it comes to the director\u2019s approach. As with her 2023 Oscar-nominated documentary Four Daughters<\/a>, she uses actors as stand-ins for real people with tactful precision. As opposed to having two actresses integrate themselves into a real Tunisian family, embodying missing sisters who have since joined Daesh fighters in Libya, The Voice Of Hind Rajab casts actors to play the Red Crescent phone operators that spent approximately three hours speaking with the imperiled child. Yet the line between roleplay and reality is increasingly diminished, obliterating the proscenium of the screen and emphasizing that what we are watching is not a sensationalist fiction, but just one example of countless war crimes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Actual recordings of Hind\u2019s conversation with PRCS operators Rana (Saja Kilani) and Omar (Motaz Malhees) form the bulk of the narrative. The actors recite these real individuals\u2019 responses, while they commune with a ghost. As the film\u2019s title explains, the voice of Hind is thoroughly present in the film; her visage arrives on-screen as Rana and Omar receive photos from the girl\u2019s relatives. The details of Hind\u2019s case have been extensively covered in the news, but as Ben Hania proves, reiteration can be a powerful tool. The five-year-old was in a car with her uncle, aunt, and three cousins as they fled from Gaza City. Their car was intercepted by an Israeli tank, which opened fire and killed everyone but Hind and her 15-year-old cousin Laya, who originally connected with the Red Crescent. After the car was sprayed with bullets once again, Laya was killed while on the phone. Yet a small, sweet voice lingered on the line, and dispatchers immediately began the convoluted process of getting Israeli military approval to send one of their ambulances to the besieged area to retrieve the girl.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As Hind\u2019s case gained international notoriety, the suspense of the film\u2019s central rescue mission should feel somewhat deflated. We all know that the child was martyred by one of the nearly 400 bullets fired at the vehicle, and that her final moments were spent trapped in a car containing the corpses of her family members. As sordid as this hard truth is, Ben Hania\u2019s focus on the humanitarian workers prevents the film from veering into full-blown nihilism. While she is certainly faithful to the audio recordings that were preserved from the emergency call, she also writes dialogue between the colleagues that prods at institutional and cultural frustrations outside of the all-encompassing devastation of armed conflict. It would take only eight minutes for an ambulance at a nearby hospital to drive and collect Hind, but the convoluted bureaucratic process that would grant rescuers a \u201cgreen light\u201d from the Israelis takes hours without avail. At one point, Omar vitriolically spits at Madhi (Amer Hlehel), his protocol-obsessed superior, \u201cIt\u2019s because of people like you that we\u2019re occupied!\u201d In Mahdi\u2019s view, however, coordinating with the Israeli army is a necessary evil that ensures the safety of his rescuers. Without securing their approval, the IDF can kill with impunity. Yet, as the occupation rages on, it\u2019s become clear that there\u2019s very little the Israeli military can\u2019t get away with, and the climax of The Voice Of Hind Rajab only further exemplifies their tyranny.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s one critique to level against Ben Hania\u2019s film, it\u2019s the lack of forging a legible path forward. As we saw last year with the acclaimed documentary No Other Land<\/a>, not even an Oscar win could secure that film American distribution, resulting in the filmmakers opting to independently release the film online. Even more nefariously, the attention of the international film community didn\u2019t deter Israeli settlers from targeting filmmakers Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal and Awdah Hathaleen, with the latter being fatally shot, a sickening mirror of No Other Land\u2018s climax. Industry members have spent years donning watermelon-inspired \u201cartists for ceasefire\u201d pins; Israel has since committed to a \u201cceasefire,\u201d but the carnage continues. Fashionable acts of protests clearly aren\u2019t cutting it. What next?\u00a0<\/p>\n

The gut-wrenching answer is that nobody has the answer. The Voice Of Hind Rajab won\u2019t single-handedly shame Israel into exiting Palestine\u2014not even the ICJ has succeeded on this front\u2014but the immediacy of her approach is commendable. Some may find the swift decision to enter production on a film about a child\u2019s brutal assassination to be in poor taste, but with the glut of devastating content emerging from Gaza each day, it makes sense to commemorate a crucial Palestinian figure while memories are fresh. The issue, however, is that our feeds contain endless recordings of children suffering persecution; we all paid close attention to Hind at the time, but the fatigue of unwavering access to genocidal viscera is broadly settling in. \u201cCheck out social media,\u201d Omar scoffs as the team decides to post online about Hind in a last-ditch effort to influence safe passage for their ambulance. \u201cChildren\u2019s bodies ripped apart on the side of the road. Do you really think the voice of a terrified little girl will spark their empathy?\u201d<\/p>\n

Director: Kaouther Ben Hania
Writer: Kaouther Ben Hania
Starring: Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees, Amer Hlehel, Clara Khoury
Release Date: December 17, 2025<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just 19 months after five-year-old Hind Rajab was targeted for murder by the Israeli military, her story was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":350694,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":{"0":"post-350693","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=350693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/350694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=350693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=350693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=350693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}