The Voice of Hind Rajab Review: Come and Hear

The greatest horror of the modern era is to normalize atrocity. It’s to look at what is going on around us, shrug, and think that’s acceptable. It’s dehumanizing and callous and opens the door to acceptance of worse crimes.

But then there are those for whom contending with atrocity is a burden. Those for whom their daily work involves trying to ameliorate the horror. That’s the weight that hangs over Omar (Motaz Malhees), an emergency services dispatcher for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, which has the impossible task of trying to send ambulances into occupied Gaza. When he’s on the phone as a family is murdered by machine gun fire from Israeli troops, all he can do is listen. Then he just has to go back to work, to try to save someone else. The horror is his normal.

What he cannot possibly expect is that, minutes after that call, he’ll be on the phone with the sole survivor. Hind Rajab, a 5-year-old girl who was hiding in the wreckage of her family car, under fire, and surrounded by the corpses of her butchered family. The smallest of mercies is that she thinks they’re just sleeping.

This high-stakes setting seems purpose-made for the screen, and you’ll wish that it was a fantastical concoction. But it’s real. On January 29, 2024, Israeli Defense Forces tanks fired on the car carrying Hind’s family, and staff at the Red Crescent society spent hours trying to provide some comfort to this girl, barely out of kindergarten, as while attempting to orchestrate a rescue.

There’s an unsettling calmness to how this is all presented: not in the streets of Gaza, but at the Red Crescent’s offices 50 miles away in the West Bank. It could be any call center in any city, white walls and web-backed wheelie chairs and monitors and marker pens. Much like Pascal Plante did with chatroom horror Red Rooms and Uta Briesewitz achieved when she stepped into the offices of an online content moderator agency in American Sweatshop, writer/director Kaouther Ben Hania (The Man Who Sold His Skin) keeps the graphic content at a distance, but it’s always there, just out of shot.

What’s more immediate is the impact on the call center staff, It’s in the way that Omar’s boss, Mahdi M. Aljamal (Amer Hlehel), trembles as he tries to arrange safe passage for their last ambulance in Gaza. It’s how Omar’s colleague, Rana Hassan Faqih (Saja Kilani), feigns a happy voice through the tears as she provides comfort for this traumatized child. It’s in the way that Omar’s supervisor, Nisreen Jeries Qawas (Clara Khoury), shows him the board of photos of the people they couldn’t save. And it’s in Omar’s increasing rage, despair, and frustration about his powerlessness.

But most of all, it’s in the use of the real recordings of Hind Rajab on the phone to the Red Crescent. The gunshots you hear are the real gunshots. The rumble of the tank is the real sound of its tracks. And the voice of a little girl, pleading with this adult she has never met to come rescue her. That’s Hind Rajab.

Some may object to Ben Hania’s use of the real recordings, but that’s pearl-clutching fake morality. The blurring of the line between real events and drama should always be the hallmark of a docudrama, especially one that deals with such a visceral and nightmarish event. Her decision is provocative, yes, but audiences should be provoked by a war crime. By staying within the Red Cross call center, she isn’t hiding the horror but denying viewers the catharsis of an action scene. Instead, they are forced to feel the despair of the call center staff, and their determination to give succor in the most hideous of settings.

In this, The Voice of Hind Rajab is not just a reminder of the crimes against humanity being committed in Gaza. It’s a reminder that the constant smears against human rights organizations and aid agencies are vile slanders by people who want this to happen again and again and again.

This article appears in January 16 • 2026.