“Imagine you’re smelling a flower. … Hold the air. … Then imagine blowing out a candle.” This was how Nisreen Qawas, a mental health officer at the Palestine Red Crescent Society emergency response center in the West Bank city of Ramallah, tried to get 5-year-old Hind Rajab to calm herself just over two years ago. Hind sat in a car surrounded by six dead family members in Gaza City while under fire from an Israeli tank. She was injured and bleeding, trapped and terrified, as she waited for a rescue team that would never arrive. She had spent hours on the phone pleading with Red Crescent staff to rescue her, her voice growing fainter: “Save me … I’m dying. I’m dying.”

This harrowing moment initially captured the world’s attention when the Red Crescent posted audio clips of its calls with Hind on social media, triggering a worldwide outcry. The anonymous, faceless statistics of the victims of Israel’s war suddenly had a name and a voice. Now, this scene is recounted in an Oscar-nominated film by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania. The Voice of Hind Rajab tells the agonizing true story of Hind’s final hours, based on recordings of the child’s desperate phone calls with emergency responders. It is a chronicle of both unimaginable horror and unrelenting humanity.

“Imagine you’re smelling a flower. … Hold the air. … Then imagine blowing out a candle.” This was how Nisreen Qawas, a mental health officer at the Palestine Red Crescent Society emergency response center in the West Bank city of Ramallah, tried to get 5-year-old Hind Rajab to calm herself just over two years ago. Hind sat in a car surrounded by six dead family members in Gaza City while under fire from an Israeli tank. She was injured and bleeding, trapped and terrified, as she waited for a rescue team that would never arrive. She had spent hours on the phone pleading with Red Crescent staff to rescue her, her voice growing fainter: “Save me … I’m dying. I’m dying.”

This harrowing moment initially captured the world’s attention when the Red Crescent posted audio clips of its calls with Hind on social media, triggering a worldwide outcry. The anonymous, faceless statistics of the victims of Israel’s war suddenly had a name and a voice. Now, this scene is recounted in an Oscar-nominated film by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania. The Voice of Hind Rajab tells the agonizing true story of Hind’s final hours, based on recordings of the child’s desperate phone calls with emergency responders. It is a chronicle of both unimaginable horror and unrelenting humanity.

On Jan. 29, 2024, Hind joined her uncle, aunt, and their four children in attempting to flee the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City. Their car was shelled by an Israeli tank, killing everyone inside except for Hind and her teenage cousin Layan. When emergency responders made phone contact with Layan, the car again came under Israeli fire. Layan—still on the line—was killed, leaving Hind alone in the car with the bodies of her dead relatives.

Red Crescent staff eventually reestablished contact with Hind and maintained intermittent communication over the next several hours as the child pleaded for help. With the car repeatedly under fire, emergency responders tried to comfort Hind while attempting to coordinate a rescue. After getting a green light from the Israeli army to proceed, they dispatched a rescue team along a route approved by Israeli military officials. But, within eyeshot of Hind, the ambulance was shelled, killing two paramedics, Ahmed al-Madhoun and Yusuf al-Zeino. Twelve days later, relatives uncovered the bodies of Hind and her family members inside their car, riddled with 335 bullets.

Israel’s official response to the incident was dismissive. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Israeli officials denied that the Israeli military was in the area or that it had coordinated with the Red Crescent that day. Multiple investigations by international organizations and media outlets such as Forensic Architecture and the Washington Post—which relied on satellite imagery and visual evidence on the ground—showed that Israeli forces were responsible for the deaths of Hind, her relatives, and the paramedics sent to rescue her. The Biden administration called on Israel to launch a formal investigation into the incident (which Israel said it would not do) but took no further action.

TheVoice of Hind Rajab is about a dying child and the four people desperately trying to save her from the merciless brutality of Israel’s war machine. It is also a pointed commentary on the international system that failed Hind and thousands of children just like her. The film’s release is well timed. It comes at a moment when the world’s attention has turned away from Gaza under the illusion of a ceasefire in which Palestinians continue to be killed almost daily.

The film, which is up for best international feature film at the Oscars, has already won numerous awards, including the grand jury prize at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival, where it received a record-breaking—and well-deserved—23-minute standing ovation. Although dramatized, TheVoice of Hind Rajab meticulously adheres to factual accounts of the events it portrays without embellishment or hype.

Despite the intensity of emotion that runs throughout, the film’s narration is subtle, even understated, relying on just four main onscreen characters—Red Crescent staffers Nisreen (Clara Khoury), Omar Alqam (Motaz Malhees), Rana Faqih (Saja Kilani), and Mahdi Aljamal (Amer Hlehel)—and, most crucially, the voice of Hind herself.

The film’s power stems from its use of real audio from actual calls recorded that day—and the audience’s haunting realization that Hind is, in effect, narrating the story of her own death. Viewers are caught up in the characters’ own whirlwind of emotions—desperation, anger, despair, and even fleeting moments of hope—along with the anguished tensions between them. We know exactly how Hind’s story ends, and yet we somehow still allow ourselves to hold out hope along with the characters. Most of all, we are left with their overwhelming sense of powerlessness, in which the array of forces marshalled by the onscreen protagonists to save Hind—ministers, ambassadors, international institutions, not to mention the heroic paramedics on the ground—prove utterly incapable of saving a single child trapped in a car.

Consumed by anger and their own sense of helplessness, the characters turn on one another. The most explosive confrontation is between Omar, the first to make contact with Hind, and Mahdi, the Red Crescent station chief, over whether to stick to Israel’s elaborate and time-consuming coordination protocol.

A rescue team is just eight minutes away from Hind, but Mahdi refuses to dispatch it without permission from the Israelis. This requires Red Crescent officials to contact the Red Cross representative in Jerusalem to make an official request with the Israeli military’s civilian coordination unit, which then notifies the Israeli army unit on the ground in Gaza, which then sends an approved route for the rescue team back up the chain. But before the ambulance can move, it needs an official green light from the Israeli army, which means repeating this same process a second time.

Omar insists on bypassing the process and sending rescuers directly to the girl, even contacting the paramedics behind his boss’s back. Mahdi’s insistence on coordination is borne not of idealism; it is purely practical. He cannot risk losing the Red Crescent’s last rescue team in northern Gaza. On the wall is a poster with the names and faces of Palestinian paramedics killed in the line of duty since Oct. 7, 2023. “I promised myself if one more photo is added to this wall I would resign,” Mahdi says.

It’s an impossible choice: Either dispatch a team that could potentially reach Hind within minutes while putting everyone’s lives at risk, or trade away precious, potentially life-saving hours to ensure the safety of the rescuers for a chance to save the child’s life. With Hind again under Israeli tank fire—and the sounds of gunfire and tank movements clearly audible on the line—Omar’s rage boils over: “Fuck your coordination!” he yells as the two nearly come to blows. Ultimately, Mahdi’s choice to coordinate was probably the right one—though it did nothing to save Hind or her would-be rescuers.

On the surface, the film’s message is clear: There is simply no way that Israeli forces—equipped with infrared scanners, electronic surveillance, and hours of advance coordination through the Red Cross—did not know who was inside the car. Or that an ambulance, with lights flashing, traveling along an approved route with paramedics whose names, plate number, and other details were shared with military authorities hours earlier, could have been shelled by accident.

But TheVoice of Hind Rajab is not just about one child’s violent death or the wrongful killing of two paramedics. Hind is one of roughly 21,000 children killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, not counting the thousands more missing and presumed dead under the rubble. Likewise, Zeino and Madhoun are among the 30 Palestinian paramedics killed in the line of duty, alongside more than 1,700 of their fellow health care workers. The fact that Hind’s tiny voice was able to capture the world’s attention was mainly a function of the Red Crescent’s decision to release the audio recordings, which instantly went viral.

Hind’s story almost single-handedly exposes the absurdity of claims that Israeli forces went out of their way to avoid harming civilians in Gaza. It is where all of the standard justifications used by Israel and its supporters to rationalize the massive civilian death toll and apocalyptic destruction in the enclave fall apart—no “human shields,” no members of Hamas in the car, no fog of war. That may be why Israeli authorities never even bothered to provide an explanation for her killing.

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The film’s setting—entirely inside Red Crescent offices—is significant. It is impossible not to reach the conclusion that the staff, despite doing everything right, is part of a bigger structure that has utterly failed its mission—either because it is fundamentally broken or because it was never designed to work. In that sense, the film is also an indictment of the international system and rules-based order’s ability to prevent—and adequately react to—atrocities.

Three days before Hind and her would-be rescuers were killed, the International Court of Justice issued a historic ruling warning of a plausible genocide in Gaza and calling on the international community to take concrete steps to prevent such an outcome—all of which were ignored. Since then, a United Nations Commission of Inquiry, along with a growing chorus of rights groups and experts, have concluded that Israel’s conduct in Gaza constitutes genocide. Despite arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for war crimes and crimes against humanity, no Israeli soldier, commander, or leader has been held to account for crimes in Gaza—or anywhere else.

In one particularly poignant scene in the film, Omar scoffs at his boss’s decision to post audio clips of Hind’s calls on social media. Scrolling through the countless photos of dead children in Gaza on his phone, Omar challenges Mahdi: “Take a good look. Children’s bodies ripped apart on the side of the road. Do you really think the voice of a terrified little girl who is bleeding will spark their empathy?”

For humanity’s sake, let’s hope the answer is yes. The best way to honor Hind’s life would be to bring her killers to justice. Until then, the least we can do is bear witness, as The Voice of Hind Rajab insists we do.