We Must All Hear ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’

‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’; directed by Kaouther Ben Hania (Tunisia, 2025); Viewed at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline. The film recently opened at the Coolidge and at West Newton Cinema in Newton.

The Oscar-nominated film, The Voice of Hind Rajab, is not an easy film to watch. The little Palestinian girl now famous around the world – and her would-be rescuers – were gunned down by the Israeli Defense Forces. And a cell phone recording captured it all. We hear it all.

The film is now available for view in limited screenings in select U.S. theaters. Like another extraordinary film, No Other Land, this is also yet to find commercial distribution. At present, when criticism of Israel’s assault on Palestinians is still recast as “antisemitism,” the screening of such films often comes under attack.

The Voice of Hind Rajab is based on the true story of Hind, the five-year-old trapped for hours in a car in Gaza. She is there, next to her relatives who had just been killed by Israeli gunfire. She begs to be rescued, using her cousin’s cell phone to call for help.

Despite its limited screenings, the film won the prestigious Grand Jury Price at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival. In fact, once the film reached an international audience at that festival, it received an extraordinary 20-minute-long standing ovation even before the prize was announced. Despite attempts to silence those documenting the carnage in Gaza, the word of Hind has spread.

Scenes from 'The Voice of Hind Rajab'; Courtesy images.

Hind’s pleas for help on a cellphone call with the Red Crescent rescue center in Ramallah, in the West Bank, has by now reverberated throughout the world. Some 70-minutes of these calls were recorded on tape, with segments originally broadcast on radio. This is how the director, Kaouther Ben Hania, first learned of Hind’s tragedy. Deeply moved, she abandoned another project to make this docu-drama, based on these recordings. The result is a heart-rending film, where Hind Rajab’s original voice speaks for itself, while actors who recreate the rescue effort, stay meticulously close to what happened during those terrible hours of entrapment.

We never see Hind in The Voice of Hind Rajab. As the film starts, all we have is a fast-moving audiowave line stretching and leaping across a black screen. A few long minutes pass before the film cuts to the Red Crescent office. Omar (Motaz Malhees), the volunteer attending to the phone, gets a puzzling call from Germany. It is Hind’s uncle trying to locate the family. When Omar tries to locate them, somebody answers. There is an urgent woman’s voice on the line, then screams, total silence.

Explosions. Bursts of rapid-fire.

The connection with the uncle is shaky, then blocked, and then, when you think that there’s no one left, Hind answers.

Rana (Saya Kilani), nun-like in her white dress and hijab, replaces Omar at the phone. It is the end of her shift as a volunteer, and she is about to leave the office. She stays and for some seven excruciating hours she and Omar are on the phone trying to reassure Hind about her rescue. The Red Crescent’s offices where they work are airy, new, and well equipped. Their gleaming glass partitions and up-to-date technology at once connect and separate, distort and muffle. That’s where we see the effort to save Hind unfold, captured graphically in the electronic mapping of the ambulance’s fatal journey: the lurching forward, an unexpected obstacle, a detour, a hesitation at a bend, and the unbearable duration of it all. While our sympathy wells up for Hind, we need to remember the courage and determination that went into trying to keep her alive.

Omar and Rana take turns at the phone. “In the name of Allah, the all-merciful and compassionate,” Rana recites with Hind. Omar, frustrated with the delays, loses his temper. Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), the director of the Center, insists on following protocol to ensure the ambulance’s safety. Their anguish is palpable, and barely alleviated by Nisreen (Clara Khoury), the psychologist, even though they had all been trained to deal with trauma.

Though much of the film’s time is given to Omar and Rana’s anguish as they try to help Hind, we are also brought close to Mahdi, the office head. Rules-abiding, we follow him through a labyrinth of bureaucratic barriers, indifference, and cruelty. We see Mahdi on the phone, desperately trying to get permits, speedy decisions, a bending of rules. He needs to line up the one remaining ambulance, to get UN approval, to get the IDF to just listen, to have a friendly doctor use his influence, to get the IDF to approve a secure route for the ambulance, and then for the IDF to give the required “green light.”

To Omar, Mahdi seems heartless. Hind is just eight-minutes away by car, Omar rages and wrests the phone from Mahdi, several times. A poster on Mahdi’s wall explains his inflexibility: It shows the smiling young faces of 20 ambulance drivers and medics who were killed during rescue operations. Exhausted, we see him lock himself in the toilet and sit on the floor, crying. He is in an impossible situation, knowing that he may be sending the rescue team to their death. In real life, after Hind’s killing, Mahdi resigned.

Directed with exacting loyalty to the actual tapes and situation, Ben Hania’s film elicits profound empathy as it stands witness to a brutal reality that is hard to watch. The actors, reading the words with little preparation, which made their own emotions all the stronger, are seen in many close-ups. That Hind herself is never seen recreates the actual situation but also makes the audience all the more attentive to what she says—the fear, the loneliness, the young voice that wants … life.

Dittmar is an Israeli-American, professor emerita UMass-Boston (literature and film studies), author of Tracing Homelands: Israel, Palestine, and the Claims of Belonging; Interlink, 2023.