As The Voice of Hind Rajab is winning over Hollywood, the real-life story is fostering complicity allegations against the Israeli military and Western complicity.
New York (Special to Informed Comment, Feature) – Recently, The Voice of Hind Rajab won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize in Venice after a 23-minute standing ovation. The docudrama is about a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed in Gaza by the Israeli military.
The story is written and directed by a Tunisian filmmaker Kaother Ben Hania, who has won a set of awards in the past few years, including two Academy Award nominations.
The film tells the real-life story of Hind Rajab, a 5-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed by Israeli military along with her family in Gaza in early 2024, even as she pleaded for help over the phone while trapped in a car under fire. The Israeli soldiers riddled the car with 335 bullets.
The Voice of Hind Rajab new clip official from Venice Film Festival 2025
The Voice of Hind Rajab new clip official from Venice Film Festival 2025
The real-life catastrophe
The nightmare started on January 29, 2024, when the healthcare system in Gaza was collapsing and a famine was looming, due to the relentless Israeli bombing and blockade of humanitarian aid. the Rajab family hoped to flee the inferno of Gaza. Determined to find a safe place somewhere else, Rajab’s uncle and aunt hurried her cousins into the black Kia to rush away from Tel al-Hawa, a neighborhood of Gaza City.
That’s when an Israeli army tank shot the car, killing Hind Rajab’s aunt and uncle, and cousins.
The only other survivor, Rajab’s 15-year-old cousin Layan Hamadeh, called the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) for emergency aid. When the dispatchers called back, Rajab answered the call, saying everyone else in the car was dead.
Hind Rajab’s final call retold at Venice Film Festival
Hind Rajab’s final call retold at Venice Film Festival
Injured in the back, hand and foot, the 5-year-old girl was told to hide in the vehicle. Since the area was besieged, the PRCS worked with the Gaza Health Ministry and the Israeli military to guarantee safe passage for their ambulance crew to rescue Rajab.
After hours of waiting, the PRCS was finally given the green light to send an ambulance. Now two ambulance workers, Yusuf al-Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun, rushed to the scene hoping to rescue the girl.
Yet, Rajab was killed by the Israeli army in what appears to have been a deliberately “planned execution,” according to an initial investigation from the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor.
As if that wasn’t enough, the IDF, relying on a U.S.-made missile, killed the two paramedics sent to rescue her.
Shell fragments of an US-made M830A1 projectile were found at the site of the bombed Red Crescent ambulance. The sales of these particular projectiles to the Israeli military were approved by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in mid-December 2023 – just weeks before the Israeli Merkava tank killed Rajab, six of her family members and the paramedics coming to rescue.
Israeli war crimes
In mid-2024, independent experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council stated Rajab’s killing might amount to a war crime. Subsequently, the legal foundation of the activist March 30 Movement was named the Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF).
The Movement itself had been created in memory of the Land Day of 1976, when Israeli security forces shot dead six Arab Israelis who were protesting the expropriation of Arab-owned lands. In turn, the HRF, a non-profit organization established in 2024, is based in Brussels, Belgium. It seeks to challenge what it describes as Israeli impunity concerning war crimes and human rights violations in Palestine, particularly in the Gaza Strip.
The Belgian political activist group has filed multiple lawsuits against people who have served in the Israeli military during the Israel-Gaza War.
In January 2025, after the announcement that a court in Brazil would investigate an Israeli soldier visiting the country for war crimes, the HRF co-head, the Belgian-Lebanese Dyab Abou Jahjah, was threatened on social media by Israeli Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli, an ambitious politician who often relies on hawkish intimidation. Chikli targeted Abou Jahjah: “Hello, our human rights activist. Watch your pager.”
It was an allusion to Israeli military’s lethal 2024 Lebanon electronic device attacks.
By March 2025, the HRF had sent the names of more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers to the International Criminal Court (ICC). It was also pursuing legal cases in many countries, including Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Cyprus, France, Germany, Nepal, the Netherlands, Romania, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and the UK.
Database of digital evidence
During their lethal service in Gaza, as well as Lebanon and Syria, Israeli soldiers have left behind not just physical footprints but digital fingerprints. Just as they might have done in peacetime conditions, many soldiers posted thousands of selfie videos and photos on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube. These posts provide abundant evidence of their commission of war crimes in Gaza.
Already in October 2024, a year after fighting in Gaza, Al Jazeera exposed Israeli war crimes in the Strip through the medium of photos and videos posted online by the soldiers themselves. Building up a database of more than 2,500 social media accounts, including thousands of videos, photos and social media posts, the network’s investigative arm (I-Unit) released damning materials revealing a range of illegal activities.
The conduct displayed in the photos and videos ranged from crass jokes and soldiers rifling through women’s underwear drawers to what seems to be the murder of unarmed civilians.
Most of the photos and videos fell into one of three categories: wanton destruction, the mistreatment of detainees and/or the use of human shields. All three may be violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) and war crimes under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
“The First Live-Streamed Genocide”: Al Jazeera Exposes War Crimes Israeli Troops Filmed Themselves
Highlighting complicity in mass atrocity crimes
Where the HRF has demonstrated the complicity of Israelis with dual citizenship in likely war crimes and genocidal atrocities, the I-Unit has exposed the complicity of Western governments, particularly the use of RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus as a base for surveillance flights over Gaza.
Historically, such complicity goes back to the 1956 Suez Crisis when the military airbase was used to serve British objectives in the Sinai Campaign, seeking to overthrow President Nasser’s government in Egypt in cooperation with French and Israeli troops.
Detail of file photo of Gaza, November 30, 2023, by Emad El Byed on Unsplash
Just as law enforcement organizations use social media posts as leads and evidence of crimes in peacetime conditions, many NGOs now scrutinize them hoping to bring Israeli soldiers to trial. In particular, the Hind Rajab Foundation hopes to have Israeli soldiers tried for war crimes or charges of genocide.
Global citizen activism can contribute to and greatly enhance the work of media and courts. That’s vital when governments and supra-national multilateral organizations fail to enforce the four mass atrocity crimes: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.
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