The Story Behind The Voice of Hind Rajab, the Oscar Contender Pushing a Global Call for Justice for Gaza Victims

Three hundred thirty-five. That is the number of bullets fired by Israeli forces at the small black Kia carrying 5-year-old Hind Rajab Hamada and six family members in Gaza on Jan. 29, 2024. The initial round killed five members of the family. Hind's cousin was later killed in another close-range attack, while Hind died several hours later after succumbing to wounds while waiting for help.

Over two years later, Hind’s mother says that “the pain never goes away, regardless of time, but it changes. I am learning to live with the loss day by day.” Wesam Rajab Hamada, who has now been evacuated from Gaza, tells TIME that Hind “always wanted to become a doctor. She didn't want anyone to be hurt. She dreamed of a healthy, clean life where children are not scared of illness, bombings, or death. I was hoping she would grow up, wear a white coat, and save children as she had dreamed about.”

Instead, Hind has become a symbol. In the months following her death, her name became known worldwide. During pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University, demonstrators renamed “Hamilton Hall” “Hind's Hall,” which in turn inspired a viral Macklemore song. But despite efforts by lawyers, activists, and even pop stars to wield Hind’s story to seek accountability for Israel’s war crimes in Gaza as reported by the UN Human Rights Council, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International, the most successful effort to share her story has been Kaouther Ben Hania’s film, The Voice of Hind Rajab, which premiered in September at the Venice Film Festival. The film opened in the U.S. in December following a lengthy wait to get picked up for distribution there.

Using real recordings by the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) on the day humanitarian workers desperately tried to save Hind, the film unflinchingly confronts these horrors through a narrative centered on the heart-wrenching effect of a child’s voice desperately calling for help. Bolstered by a roster of stars serving as executive producers—including Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Alfonso Cuarón, Jonathan Glazer, Spike Lee, and Michael Moore—the movie won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, and has since had a blistering run at international film festivals and award shows, earning Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for Best International Film.

“I believe that this movie can hopefully mark a change. It’s a call for accountability and for justice, because if we don't have accountability and justice, we don't have peace,” says Ben Hania. “My purpose was to make her voice echo beyond the circle of people who agree with me. I had in mind the people who would refute the movie due to their beliefs that the IDF is the most moral army in the world.”

An evacuation, interrupted

The story of Hind’s final day unfolded quickly, and then painfully slowly. Nearly four months after the start of the latest war in Gaza, the Israeli army issued evacuation orders for the west of Gaza City, forcibly displacing the Hamada family from the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood. At 9:32 a.m, Hind's uncle began to drive away with his wife, their four children, Hind, and her younger brother Iyad, while Wesam and other family members fled on foot. At the last moment, Hind’s brother jumped out of the car to stay with his mother. But Wesam would not see her daughter alive again.

Barely a quarter mile in, Israeli gunfire erupted, killing everyone except for Hind and her 15-year-old cousin, Layan, a Washington Post investigation revealed. In distress, Layan called family members, who contacted the PRCS for help. A dispatcher in Ramallah reached Layan around 2:30 p.m. “They are shooting at us. The tank is next to me,” Layan said. She then screamed, before a series of shots were heard and her voice abruptly stopped. The Red Crescent called back immediately, and Hind answered. She was injured, the only passenger still alive.

The car was then surrounded by Israeli armored vehicles, as per the Post and Forensic Architecture. “I’m so scared. Please come,” Hind pleaded on the phone. An ambulance was dispatched three hours later from Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, only three kilometers away. What should have been a short drive was stymied by the Red Crescent having to coordinate its route with Israeli authorities to clear the route with military units. In theory, this should have guaranteed a safe passage, and a chance for paramedics to save Hind.

The ambulance arrived at the scene before 6:00 p.m., when it was shot upon arrival by Israeli Merkava tanks using U.S.-made 120-mm rounds. Hind was bleeding and losing consciousness. Her voice went silent at 7:30 p.m. Twelve days later, when Israeli forces evacuated the area, her body, those of her six family members, and those of the two paramedics whose ambulance was only 50 m away, were found by journalists and civil defense crews. Forensic evidence  showed that the tanks were so close (13 to 23 m) that the Israeli soldiers would have had a clear view of the civilians in the car. 

In a statement from February 2024 shared with Sky News, the IDF said that its forces “were not present near the vehicle or within the firing range of the described vehicle in which the girl was found.” However, the IDF later published reports that conflict with these statements. In a press release issued 12 days after Hind’s death, videos released by the IDF showed units in the area. Sky News reports that the press release was later deleted from the IDF’s website.

Proceeding cautiously, but urgently

When news of Hind Rajab’s death was broadcast to the world, Ben Hania was still promoting her previous film, the 2023 documentary Four Daughters. But she became glued to her phone with “a strong sense of helplessness—and I hate feeling helpless,” she says. And so the idea for the film was born.

Ben Hania is no stranger to films that deal with current events while grabbing Hollywood’s attention. The Oscar-nominated Four Daughters tells the story of a Tunisian mother, Olfa, after two of her daughters left to join ISIS in 2016. Ben Hania’s film before that, 2020’s Oscar-nominated The Man Who Sold His Skin, parodies the art world’s fetishization of refugees.

The Voice of Hind Rajab recounts the story of Hind’s death through the perspective of the dispatchers who tried to save her, using the real audio recordings of Hind’s voice. In doing so, it becomes a form of witness cinema: one conscious of the power of film—and art—in eliciting empathy and conversations that can challenge the status quo.

“I was in a place where cinema can do better than explaining. We are done explaining. Cinema can build empathy. I needed to do a movie in the present tense,” says Ben Hania.

Many had warned that it was too soon after Hind’s killing to make such a film. But Ben Hania insists on the urgency of the project. “There is no accountability for Israel,” she says. “I did this movie for this purpose—to be part of a call for justice. When you don't do anything in a situation where there is no accountability, and killing is happening every day, you are complicit.”

Ben Hania knew the film had to be made with the utmost care for ethics and respect to its subjects. For this reason, one of her first orders of business was to call Hind’s mother, to not only receive Wesam’s permission, but her blessing. And Wesam approved. She tells TIME, “I believe that cinema can show the truth with a human depth that numbers and news articles can’t. If influential and powerful people see such works with open hearts, then it might help in the way they perceive what’s happening in Gaza on a human level.”

Eliciting authentic performances

To remain faithful to true events, Ben Hania cast four Palestinian actors who spoke the same Arabic dialect and looked similar to the real Red Crescent dispatchers, with whom the actors spoke in preparation for the film. The director also made sure the actors didn’t hear Hind’s voice recordings until they started shooting the film. This made for a painstaking three-week shoot in Tunisia, but brought out performances that felt more like genuine reactions.

“I always believed that acting is not acting. It's a moment of truth,” says Motaz Malhees, who plays emergency operator Omar Alqam. “That's how it felt on set. It's you listening to the real voice of a child talking to you, who wants to be rescued. What else do you need? If you have any emotions in you, you will explode. So it felt real. You can't deny this voice.”

The actors gave in to the fragility of Hind’s voice as it rang out, “Come get me! It’s hard to breathe. I can’t get out.” Saja Kilani, the Palestinian-Jordanian-Canadian actor who plays Omar’s supervisor, Rana Faqih, says the director shot long takes to allow the “real emotion” to come out. “It was very raw, very real,” says Kilani. “A lot of this film, if not all of it, was purely about listening.”

In one scene, someone holds up a phone showing the real footage of the Red Crescent workers that day, further blurring the lines between documentary and performance. “The film was very faithful to the horror that Hind and her mother lived, as well as to the operation-room personnel,” says Nisreen Jeries Qawas, the director of mental health and psychosocial support at the PRCS, who is portrayed in the film by Clara Khoury.

Working for justice, on the screen and beyond it

More than 20,000 children were killed by Israeli forces in two years of war, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported. This does not include the thousands likely missing or buried under the rubble. Despite a cease-fire taking effect on Oct. 10, 2025, Qawas says that “the situation in Gaza has not changed. If it has changed, it has changed for the worse. Hundreds of thousands of people are living in tents, under the sky, without anything to protect them from the bad weather or from malnutrition.” Increasing global awareness of cases like Hind’s feels crucial for Qawas. “As a therapist, it’s really difficult, but the thing we keep in our minds and hearts is hope,” she says.

For Dyab Abou Jahjah, the founder of the Hind Rajab Foundation, what happened to Hind was “the most symbolic event of this genocide.” It’s the reason he named the organization, which pursues legal action against Israeli soldiers who have committed war crimes, after her. In a 120-page report filed to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, the foundation’s legal team found that Hind’s killing amounted to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, under Articles 6, 7, and 8 of the Rome Statute, naming the 24 Israeli soldiers and three commanders who allegedly participated in the attack.

U.N. experts also called what happened that day a “war crime,” and part of “a broader pattern of indiscriminate killings of civilians attempting to find shelter and escape the fighting in Gaza.” Since the start of the latest war, 88% of Israeli military investigations into allegations of war crimes or abuses by its soldiers were “either still under review with no public data on progress, or had been closed without any finding of wrongdoing,” an investigation by conflict monitoring group Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) revealed. 

The Hind Rajab Foundation, which is not linked with the film, takes legal action within the framework of universal jurisdiction, filing cases against Israeli soldiers who they report have committed war crimes in Gaza and who hold dual citizenship or travel abroad. They have done so in almost 30 countries since the start of the war. One key country they haven’t managed to file cases in yet, largely due to the role the Department of Justice plays in cases involving war crimes, is the United States.

“The American participation in this genocide, when it comes to the number of perpetrators, is incredible. It's the highest among all [foreign] nationalities,” says Abou Jahjah. Over 12,000 IDF soldiers have a U.S. passport, surpassing France, the second highest country with dual-national soldiers serving in the Israeli army, by almost double, recent data obtained by investigative outlet Declassified UK and the Israeli NGO Hatzlacha revealed.

Abou Jahjah adds that “people in the United States who take the rule of law seriously” have a “responsibility” to challenge this impunity. Regarding the film, he says, “the cultural awareness aspect is crucial, and maybe more important than what we're doing. Art can achieve things that politicians, lawyers, or structures cannot achieve alone.”

Ben Hania, whose third Oscar nomination in five years helps cement her status as a modern legend of Arab cinema, calls The Voice of Hind Rajab “a movie about helplessness, but also a call for action.” One in which Hind’s voice represents thousands of Palestinian voices, most of them unheard or forgotten. As Hind’s mother put it, “I ask for justice by keeping Hind’s story alive and not allowing her life to be reduced to a number or a news alert. Justice, for me, is not just holding the responsible people accountable, but also acknowledging the stolen humanity of all Palestinian victims.”