Film Exposes How Israel Killed Hind Rajab While She Fled Gaza — Premieres at Joburg Festival

The Oscar‑nominated film The Voice of Hind Rajab will premiere at the Joburg Film Festival, bringing an unflinching account of how Hind Rajab—a five‑year‑old Palestinian girl—was killed at the hands of the Israeli army while trying to flee a neighbourhood in Gaza.

“Wisam Hamada, the mother of the Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, said that the silence of the world contributed to her daughter's death at the hands of the Israeli army, along with several of her relatives, during their attempt to flee a neighborhood in Gaza City in January 2024”

Al-Jazeera Net

The screening arrives at a moment Mail & Guardian frames as part of the broader human cost of Israel’s military violence, and Al‑Jazeera highlights that the film preserves Hind’s final phone recording as evidence of the crime.

Al-Jazeera Net

The festival showing forces South African audiences to confront individual civilian deaths that the film’s makers say reflect ongoing devastation in Gaza.

Director Kaouther Ben Hania constructs the film as a hybrid of documentary and dramatization that reconstructs the real‑life emergency call and the operations room of Palestinian Red Crescent volunteers who tried to rescue Hind and her family.

Mail & Guardian describes the film’s method — moving between actors in the call‑centre and real cellphone footage — while Al‑Jazeera and Amnesty International reporting quoted in the film’s coverage confirm the recording at the heart of the film is the actual distress call made by Hind during the rescue attempt.

The Mail & Guardian

This formal approach is intended to make the recorded plea and the failure of rescue efforts unmistakably visible to viewers.

Al‑Jazeera publishes the harrowing last words Hind spoke on the phone—“I'm scared... come take me” and “Mama, they're lying. Stay with me.”

“Wisam Hamada, the mother of the Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, said that the silence of the world contributed to her daughter's death at the hands of the Israeli army, along with several of her relatives, during their attempt to flee a neighborhood in Gaza City in January 2024”

Al-Jazeera Net

Her mother testifies that an ambulance was dispatched but never arrived because it and the paramedics were targeted and killed.

Hind’s mother tells Amnesty and Al‑Jazeera that the silence of world governments made the crime possible, and she frames the failed rescue and the killing of medical teams as explicit denials of the right to save life amid Israeli operations.

The film preserves these final lines to document the direct human cost of those actions.

Hind’s mother uses the film and her testimony to condemn global and governmental silence, saying that silence “paves the way for [the crime's] repetition” and that Palestinians continue to suffer daily killings, lack of water, electricity, food, medicine and a collapsed health system.

Al‑Jazeera quotes her insistence that “normal life has not returned to the Gaza Strip,” and Mail & Guardian places the film within a wider pattern of Israeli military violence that international viewers must confront.

The Mail & Guardian

The film’s screening at Joburg is presented as both memorial and indictment: evidence that the consequences of those operations are borne overwhelmingly by civilians, including countless children.

Organizers and critics insist the film matters because it turns a single recorded plea into a lasting witness to what the filmmakers and Hind’s family describe as deliberate failures of rescue and ongoing civilian slaughter.

“Wisam Hamada, the mother of the Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, said that the silence of the world contributed to her daughter's death at the hands of the Israeli army, along with several of her relatives, during their attempt to flee a neighborhood in Gaza City in January 2024”

Al-Jazeera Net

Mail & Guardian notes the screening’s timeliness amid wider regional violence reported in its coverage, while Al‑Jazeera stresses the film’s role in documenting crimes so future generations can see the evidence rather than letting official silence erase victims.

Al-Jazeera Net

Audiences in Johannesburg will confront audiovisual proof that, according to the film and Hind’s mother, Israeli soldiers were present while a child begged for help and no rescue reached her.