ON 29 JANUARY 2024, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (a key provider of emergency medical services and hospitals in Gaza) released audio of a five-year-old girl in a besieged neighbourhood of Tel Al-Hawa. While under fire from the Israeli Defence Force, the young girl begged for her life. ‘I’m so scared,’ she said. ‘Please come. Come take me. Please, will you come?’ Her name was Hind Rajab. Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania subsequently approached the Palestinian Red Crescent Society for the entire seventy minutes’ worth of audio before conducting her own interviews with the society’s volunteer staffers. The script born from this research led to her third feature film, The Voice of Hind Rajab. 

Hind Rajab’s story unfolded four months into the spectacular unleashing of Israeli military violence on the people of Gaza. Hind and her family had been following evacuation orders. She remained trapped in the car with the corpses of her six family members for hours as Red Crescent staff tried to arrange a rescue operation. When emergency workers finally reached her, the IDF used an American-made weapon to shell Rajab and her rescue crew. Three hundred and fifty-five bullets hit the car.

In September 2025, an independent United Nations report concluded Israel had committed genocidal acts against Palestinians. The report cited the killing of Hind and her family, stating that ‘Israeli security forces had clear knowledge of the presence of Palestinian civilians along the evacuation routes and within the safe areas but nevertheless they shot at and killed civilians, some of whom (including children) were holding makeshift white flags’.

The story is emblematic, then, of today’s defining, shared mass event of war, horror and state violence. Throughout The Voice of Hind Rajab, Ben Hania’s cast of Palestinian actors respond to the real recording of Hind. Hind’s mother, Wissam Hamada, appears in the film’s finale. Her presence here and at subsequent film festivals gives the project a moral authority, radicalising the often-conservative cultural figure of the mother. The hybrid docu-fiction was eventually backed by a roster of A-list Hollywood producers, including Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Alfonso Cuarón and Jonathan Glazer.

Humble in its artistic form and held together by a somewhat literal quality, Ben Hania’s film treats its primary source material and its subjects with the utmost respect by refusing the aesthetics of monumentality. What may be surprising to viewers is the way the film’s artistic strategies are precisely and significantly repurposed from the television and cinema of the American empire after 9/11, rendering the film formally reminiscent – and yet entirely subversive – of entertainment from the War on Terror era.

‘HERE IN HOLLYWOOD we must continue making our movies and our TV programs… The country needs what we create,’ wrote Jack Valentini in Variety on 27 September 2001. Weeks after 9/11, the longtime lobbyist, decorated veteran and then-president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America wanted a decidedly gung-ho form of cultural patriotism: ‘Murderers recoil and retreat, they are done for, when the great majority of Americans refuses to be cabined and confined in a prison of fear, but instead says to terrorists: Up yours, you bastards.’ 

Valenti needn’t have worried; a fresh, fist-pumping American hero was already in the wings. On the morning of 9/11, episodes four and five of a new Fox series were in production. 24 told the story of an assassination plot across a single day. Agent Jack Bauer of the Counter Terrorist Unit targets a plan on an American senator and – in a familiar dash of television melodrama – must also rescue his own daughter and wife, who have been kidnapped by mercenaries. The first season’s backstory drew inspiration from the real-world war in Kosovo that dominated the nightly news of my ’90s childhood, but it was the 9/11 terror attacks that vitalised 24’s reception. Suddenly vivid, the show’s dialogue and plot points transcended their original vision. Season Two ditched the now-anachronistic Yugoslav baddies for Islamic sleeper cells, but the tense storytelling techniques remained the same: a plot that counted down in seconds (like a bomb), imitations of satellite imagery, digital video feeds, data screens, control rooms, labyrinthine maps of cities in ruins and authoritative intertitles identifying secret locations.

Jack Bauer became a type of US patriot’s wish fulfillment of tough law-enforcement guys who cut unilaterally through the red tape. In a 2025 interview with Deadline, executive producer and showrunner Howard Gordon states:

Suddenly we were getting to write about this character who had become America’s hero. Jack, cut from the old-school cloth of the individual, rugged American hero who bucks authority and does whatever he needs to do to get the job done and doesn’t throw up excuses, was part of the line of Clint Eastwood… [he was] a character we hadn’t seen quite that robustly expressed on television. I think we, the writers, really got to unconsciously express our anger at the terrorists and at the bureaucracy.

The parallel with Eastwood seems to me deeply off balance and ahistorical. During the 2000s, Eastwood kept making the same story he’d been perfecting for decades, in which mavericks and outsiders to government expose institutional corruption and correct tyrannical decay. In Million Dollar Baby (2004) and Gran Torino (2008), Eastwood stands up for the little guy, the Other, so that the American Dream might flourish. 

Eastwood is a right-wing libertarian, not a neoconservative or US government apologist; his protagonists would be more inclined to unveil Jack Bauer’s routine law violations, including ‘torture, murder, aggravated assault, armed robbery (including carjacking), airplane hijacking, burglary, and making false statements to government officials (usually his superiors)’. 24’s producers were of a different variety of American conservative, and they would be pressured into repairing the damage done by their version of patriotic representation. They eventually met with the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, subsequently claiming that they had tempered the ferocity of their show’s not-so-subliminal stoking of American desire for extra-judicial vengeance.

And yet not even Eastwood – quietly anti-intervention – remained immune to the 24 effect. He made one film during this period that didn’t entirely fit his usual political gambit. In the early 2010s, Warner Bros approached Eastwood to adapt a bestselling memoir by the US military’s most lethal sniper, Chris Kyle. After four tours of duty and 160 clinical kills, Kyle was psychologically wrecked by war-inflicted trauma. In Eastwood’s American Sniper (2014), Fallujah’s serpentine streets are framed in overhead helicopter shots and automatic crosshairs, and Kyle is resurrected as an honest hero by a soulfully wounded, muscled-up Bradley Cooper.

I felt for Kyle. His homicidal tendencies did not come from any intrinsic character flaw but his rigorous training to reinforce American national security. But there is something very narrow-sighted about this cinematic emphasis on the emotional impact upon soldiers carrying out kills at close distance. It’s a kind of imperial-scaled narcissism to extend empathy to the killer and not to the killed through the weaponised cinematic gaze of military operations. 

This solipsism was axiomatic of post-9/11 entertainment. In 2011, the makers of 24 followed up with Homeland, in which US Marine Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) returns home as an al-Qaeda sleeper agent. Brody is pursued by CIA officer Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), an anti-hero whose bipolar disorder muddies the perceptiveness of her conspiratorial thinking. Showtime’s Homeland played anti-war sentiment cleverly, with just enough callouts to sceptics of US foreign policy, amid a strong mood of doom and anti-bureaucratic urgency. Based on an acclaimed Israeli TV series, Homeland mastered a general ambience that could suit a wide range of agendas while ultimately normalising the prevalence of the security apparatus.

Like 24, Homeland showed the world under one eye – a new order of digital vigilance and all-encompassing terrorist threats in which everyone is a suspect. As a cultural form designed to explain and manage the US’s crisis abroad, Homeland’s performance of ambivalence about the Coalition of the Willing has not dated well: it’s a dilemma of the domestic American psyche. Everyone other than the white American is Other, and the white American soldier has been ‘turned’ into the ultimate Other.

Homeland was informed by annual, intense research meetings with CIA officials, intelligence experts and the State Department; these sessions were dubbed ‘Spy Camp’ by the show’s creators. ‘We’d already been turned down by the military, which was so cooperative on 24,’ Gordon told Hollywood Reporter. At Spy Camp, showrunner Alex Gansa would ask ‘What keeps you up at night?’ to ensure the show’s storylines were current and plausible.

THE TREND IN TV continued crossing over to cinema, with truth-y plot points appropriated from a news world of rendition, enhanced torture techniques, ISIS conversions, jihadi hostage videos, public beheadings in Tehran and, eventually, Russian election interference. Like American Sniper, Kimberley Peirce’s Stop-Loss (2008) concentrated on a US soldier who goes AWOL rather than return to the field – cinema through the crosshairs, with American patriots taking shots between breaths and heartbeats. Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012) drew its sense of realnessfrom the excruciating detail with which it portrayed (and legitimised) the merciless torture of terror suspects. The trashier Act of Valor (2012), directed by Mouse McCoy, used real-life combat tactics, live ammunition and first-person shooter vantage point. Even Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins trilogy embroiled critics and academics in battle over its alleged fascistic politics, relayed in plotlines replete with plane hijackings, secretive CIA men, vigilantes and freelance goodies propping up the Anglo-American order. 

All these films shared a commonality: they employed these visual and narrative strategies from the centre of the American empire, looking outwards. All of them humanised CIA operatives, intelligence experts, spies and soldiers, turning them into full, hot-blooded personalities who were variously mentally ill, family guys, brainwashed or just hellishly determined. None were intended to join that what John le Carré called the ‘squalid procession of vain fools, traitors…pansies, sadists and drunkards’ following the directives of liars, madmen, tyrants and deceptive politicians. This was a genre – the spy and war thriller – that had become stale in the 1990s with the loss of the USSR as a cultural opponent.

Some 2000s-era films – such as Stephen Garghan’s Syriana (2005), the Coen brothers’ screwball Burn After Reading (2008) and Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies (2008) – turned a critical eye to American hubris abroad in the shock after war. But one chain of films differentiated itself from this trend. Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity (2002) was a stressful, action-driven film hauled out of novelist Robert Ludlum’s original Cold War setting by screenwriters Tony Gilroy and William Blake Herron. The script engaged in a new moral queasiness about what spying and policing actually involve – sneaking around sovereign nations, never questioning orders, using lethal force to execute national security measures. Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne was brainwashed into the spy game; now, he wanted out. This meant that the romance, women, sexiness and glam of James Bond was out, too; the archetypal espionage story’s killing and secrecy looked anti-democratic and destructive. The film’s ironic tragedy came from the fact that Bourne had to employ the same murderous techniques taught to him by the CIA in order to escape his violent past and rediscover his pre-amnesiac identity.

Directed by Paul Greengrass, the sequels were increasingly pointed in their stance. The franchise remains the most consistent critique of US foreign policy recognisable in any entertainment of the period. In a shaky, handheld psuedo-documentary style, the spy thriller’s aesthetic template was finally being subverted.

IT’S TAKEN ANOTHER human rights cataclysm to provoke another genre subversion. Great thrillers almost always keep to a confined time and space. In The Voice of Hind Rajab, the ‘action’ is tightly focused on a Ramallah call centre. It’s an office movie, a setting not as readily dramatic as a submarine or tank or space shuttle. Ben Hania’s take on the procedural and the war movie rejects all the tired tropes, the gruesome battle scenes, sequences in which generals plan and strategise in tents. Instead, digital maps recur, red dots move at an agonising pace across enlarged screens, impatient orders are given in dispatch rooms across desks and into headsets, bursts of offscreen gunfire give way to silence. The viewer hears warspeak of ‘restrictive zones’ as scenes cut away to computer screens and blurred lines of luminosity quiver to visualise soundwaves. Tension is created by the sense that the characters have to beat the clock.

These are deeply familiar techniques from post 9/11 American film and TV – surveillance visuals, birds-eye maps, overhead tracking, an urgent sense of the present tense in ticking timestamps, with actors shot in close, hand-held, pacing takes – used to wildly different effect. In our culture, a call centre’s location is usually a symbol of neoliberalism: offshore, anonymous, disembodied, a source of consumer dissatisfaction. Here, we see a bureaucratic tragedy within a story that rejects political neutrality. The hegemonic American-centric ideology is challenged by shifting the gaze to that of the colonised; our attention is turned to a system of mass killing in our time. Call centre employee Omar (Motaz Malhees) and his colleagues Leila (Nesbat Souran) and Nisreen (Clara Khoury) are not just figures in the backdrop of a crisis in Westerners’ lives. A great deal of mainstream cinema and TV starts from the buckling psychology of the American political subject and simply ignores or flattens the inner lives of the peoples the empire wages war against; institutions of the state apparatus eventually ‘make right’ and deliver justice. We’re far less accustomed to the humanitarian scene presented in The Voice of Hind Rajab, in which military and bureaucratic powers are the obstacles to peace and redemption.

Ben Hania’s film brought me to tears after just six minutes. Not because I found it especially harrowing: without a drop of blood, the film is less explicit than anything I see on Al Jazeera’s Instagram feed every morning. More than anything, it was a profound relief to watch cinema – rather than media, news or user-generated clips – that simply acknowledged the unbearable fury and sadness of this genocide (or even the fact that this it is happening) and the failures of social democracy. Devastating details proliferate: the black Kia Picanto containing Hind Rajab’s family, the tenderness of Omar and his co-workers, the name of the petrol station in northern Gaza where the attack occurred, the reveal of a contrived system of rules that compel emergency services to seek approval from the IDF (which nonetheless kills in cold blood), the way in which the human voice becomes a form of primary historical material. The Red Cross at times refuses to coordinate a safe passage across the tanks and shelling. The sun sets. ‘Do you think the city resembles this map? The city has become featureless,’ Mahdi, the Red Crescent manager, implores. His volunteer staff await instructions, process a change of route and trace ambulance delays in their professional, middle-class work environment. Throughout, the film’s tone hovers somewhere between excruciating and mundane, stressful and stricken.

And yet what I will remember of Hind Rajab herself is the sound of a child who’s scared, tough and unformed. Her murder renders her story unfinished and her character unknowable. Dead children are inscrutable and enigmatic forever; if my own daughter died today, I could never claim to know her future desires or neuroses. Hind Rajab has become an avatar representing the Palestinian people; she is one of approximately twenty thousand of them killed in the last two-and-half years. Doubtless this is an important film, and yet something about its essential approach got stuck in my throat. 

Some critics have taken umbrage at the ethical considerations of using a dead girl’s real voice. These are concerns I do not share, given how clear it is that Ben Hania’s film is simple, honest and non-exploitative in sensibility, modest in means and unadorned in form. It’s told without subplots or manipulative deviations from the central problem. What irks me is the politics of the film’s humanising aims. The liberalism of the documentary’s impulse to humanise the Palestinian people via Hind Rajab seems to me both naive and unreachable. The world has no dearth of images and sounds providing testimony of Israeli destruction and Palestinian anguish; we in the West have ‘awareness’.

I understand the impulse to bring the size of the devastation back down to the beating heart of a singular person. But have we truly not yet learnt that human suffering is always human suffering, that a statistic always has a face and a name, that one child is everyone’s child? Hind Rajab the person, the girl and now the symbol, remains ultimately Other and disturbingly abstract. This induces a feeling of craziness within me: one thousand days into this phase of the war to obliterate Palestinians, we are still at the ground zero stage of advocating that Palestinians exist, that their struggle for freedom is legitimate, and that they will never stop trying to put the pieces of their homeland back together.

_{^{Image credit: Alex Latvian via Unsplash}}