The Voice of Hind Rajab

A harrowing portrait of innocence, bureaucracy, and the human cost of war

The recent war in Gaza was bound to spark art attempting to grapple with the horrors and devastating loss it has caused. One of the most potent stories to emerge from the unimaginable civilian death toll was that of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old girl whose call to first responders after an Israeli military attack was heard around the world. Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania has chosen to dramatize this story in her latest film, The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025).

The Voice of Hind Rajab takes place entirely in a call center for the Red Crescent volunteer team in the West Bank in January 2024. The Red Crescent oversees the coordination of ambulances in Gaza to locate victims. One cheery operator, Omar (Motaz Malhees), receives a call from a car under attack. He is soon speaking with a terrified six-year-old girl, calming her and assuring her that help is on the way. Yet the bureaucracy involved in dispatching an ambulance—subject to approval from the Israeli army—means that what should be an eight-minute drive to save the girl is delayed for hours.

Ben Hania is no stranger to tackling difficult subjects in her films. Her dramatic feature The Man Who Sold His Skin(2020) explored the exploitative nature of the Western art world and performative charities responding to suffering in the Middle East, while her experimental documentary Four Daughters (2023) mined memory to understand why a woman’s daughters left to join the Islamic State. The Tunisian auteur has honed her craft with each film without losing her boldness or tact. The Voice of Hind Rajab is her strongest work yet, largely due to another melding of fiction and reality first explored in Four Daughters: the voice heard by the Red Crescent operators is the real recording of Hind’s actual call. This gives the film a paradoxical Brechtian quality, constantly reminding us of the artifice of performance while simultaneously deepening our emotional immersion, as we hear Hind’s small voice asking for help and whispering her fear.

This fusion of reality and fiction proves especially powerful in a conflict that has become deeply divisive in the West, where humanity and emotion are often displaced by convoluted arguments over history, ideology, and numbers. This is not to suggest that the complexity of the conflict should be dismissed, but at the ground level those abstractions dissolve when confronted with a child pleading for survival. Much like anti-war films such as Paths of Glory (1957) or Platoon(1986), which emphasize that the “why” of a war becomes irrelevant when faced with death and inhumanity, Hind Rajab’s story distills the conflict to its most devastating truth. Hers is an almost archetypal—were it not real—example of the innocent victims of war, a fear and suffering that is impossible not to empathize with.

When dealing with the story of a real person, especially that of a young girl in a war zone, the risk of exploitation is ever present—something Ben Hania herself critiqued in The Man Who Sold His Skin. Yet the decision to use Hind’s real voice rather than cast another actress, combined with the choice to confine the film entirely to a call center, creates a necessary distance and a deeply affecting portrayal of wartime helplessness, far more potent than staging gunfire or explosions. In this respect, the film recalls the effectiveness of the Danish thriller The Guilty (2018), which similarly trapped audiences in a call operator’s limited perspective. The claustrophobic setting of The Voice of Hind Rajab amplifies the Red Crescent volunteers’ frustration, as they are unable to physically intervene and must navigate a cruel and nonsensical bureaucracy to secure permission from the very forces responsible for the violence.

The film’s actors, all Palestinian, are exceptional in conveying escalating helplessness and rage, emotions that seep into the audience until, by the time the credits roll, you are left shaken with sadness and anger. Malhees embodies this frustration without resorting to cliché or overstatement, while Saja Kilani becomes a vital conduit for the mounting dread as one of the operators who speaks directly with Hind. Amer Hlel is also crucial as the supervisor, torn between bypassing protocol to save Hind and the grim reality that sending an ambulance without authorization could result in the deaths of the EMTs themselves, adding to the already long list of fallen Red Crescent volunteers.

The Voice of Hind Rajab is a vital contribution to the artistic dialogue surrounding the war in Gaza, distilling the conflict to its human cost and needless suffering with tact and heartbreak. It is nearly impossible to leave the cinema unmoved, hearing Hind’s real voice tremble with fear yet persist with remarkable resolve. Ben Hania delivers her most poignant and powerful film to date, and one can only hope it reaches those who need to see it—and, as the greatest art does, changes how we see the world.

9.2/10