The Voice of Hind Rajab: Kaouther Ben Hania in conversation with Selma Dabbagh

On 14 January 2026, Ibraaz was honoured to screen The Voice of Hind Rajab (Dir. Kaouther Ben Hania, 2025) and to host the conversation that took place between the filmmaker and Dr. Selma Dabbagh. The conversation below, introduced by Lina Lazaar in our Minassa space at Ibraaz, has been edited for clarity and is published alongside an essay by Anthony Downey that addresses the background and broader impact of the film.

Lina Lazaar: It is real pleasure to welcome Kaouther Ben Hania, a friend and an extraordinary filmmaker with whom I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with over the years through the Kamel Lazaar Foundation. Thank you, Kaouther, for being here. It’s an even greater privilege to witness Kaouther’s growth into a filmmaker who tells urgent and necessary stories with rare courage and has become unquestionably one of the most important voices in Arab cinema today. When we imagined the space, the one we’re sitting in now, the Minassa, it was with artists like Kaouther that we had in mind – artists whose work is intellectually rigorous, ethically engaged, and deeply attuned to the present moment. It is therefore a particular honour that her work and the spirit of Hind Rajab exist with us here today. Kaouther will be in conversation with Selma Dabbagh, a brilliant novelist and lawyer, whose work is shaped by the legal and political architecture of occupation, exile, and power. Her first novel, Out of It (2011), explores how these forces reimagine time, space, and the very notion of the self, and I warmly encourage you to read it. 

Selma Dabbagh (SD): I know the film is still sitting with the audience, and I appreciate that it’s a hard moment, but it’s a real pleasure to be here with Kaouther. I want to begin by saying how extraordinary it is to have made such a powerful film out of something so simple: a girl who’s crying out for help with an ambulance eight minutes away, but the ambulance can’t move. Why? That’s a basic question. And then from that moment, so much is displayed about the nature of Israeli occupation and its impact on the Palestinian people. Can you talk a little bit about how the idea to turn the situation into a film came to you when you first heard that recording, and what steps you took?

Kaouther Ben Hania (KBH): Thank you very much to each one of you for coming to see and to hear The Voice of Hind Rajab, to bear witness, and thank you, Lina, for this incredible space. It’s wonderful to be here. When I heard the actual voice of Hind Rajab for the first time, I was in the middle of what we call the ‘Oscar campaign’ with my previous movie, Four Daughters (2023), and they were about to start the pre-production of another movie I’ve been working on for several years. But at the same time, I was glued to the news, following what was happening in Gaza and asking myself what it means to be a filmmaker, or storyteller, when the reality is beyond what we can comprehend. And then I heard the voice of Hind Rajab – it was on social media. It was small audio extract of a child begging for her life. And it hit me hard, and I couldn’t unhear it. I had this strong feeling of anger, sadness – sadness but also helplessness. I asked myself: What can I do? When I heard her voice, I made the decision to make a movie, because social media isn’t a great place to hear or to remember – it’s a place for scrolling amnesia. Hind Rajab was one child among thousands. I thought maybe I can honour her voice by putting it in a cinematic form where people can sit, listen, and bear witness. So this is how everything started. I put aside the other movie I was working on – for me, it wasn’t the right time to do it – and I’ve been working on this movie since, which we shot almost one year ago.

SD: One of the things I found when I heard about the concept of the film was, partly, that I didn’t want to see it because I was following Gaza very closely. I felt I know what happens, and I don’t really want to expose myself to more suffering. But what I found incredible when I watched it was that the film does not only convey the killing and the very sadistic cruelty – which I saw as a downward trajectory leading to the killing of Hind Rajab and the Red Crescent staff – but that horror is offset in a way by what’s going on with the medics in the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) – the way that they bond with Hind Rajab and pull together with each other is more of an upward journey. It’s inspiring. And what you capture  in their characters, what you’ve shown by using their actual words, is the tenacity, the bravery, the loyalty, the compassion, the humour, and the resilience. The film does so much to challenge standard stereotypes we have had to endure about Palestinians as either victims or terrorists. In relation to the PRCS, how did you start putting together their voices?

KBH: First, I want to say that you are not the only person who was afraid. Even me, doing this movie, I was afraid. I was scared to death. They tell me this movie changed me. But when I decided to do this movie, I did two things: I contacted the PRCS because it was a small extract that I had heard on the internet. They are a call centre, so they recorded the entire conversation with Hind Rajab. I reached out to them to ask to hear all of the recording, and they shared it with me. They trusted me and they shared 70 minutes with me, and everything was there in the recording from the killing of Layan Hamada, a teenage cousin of Hind Rajab. We can hear the killing of Layan, and then all the conversation with Hind until the bombing of the ambulance and the deaths of the two PRCS paramedics, Yusuf al-Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun. All those elements were in the original recording. The other element was when I started thinking about responsibility – and my responsibility – and my legitimacy as the one to tell this story, I needed to talk to Hind’s mother, Wissam Rajab, because without her – not only her approval, but her blessing – I couldn't do this movie. At the time, she was still in Gaza mourning, but we had this incredible conversation. She’s a very courageous woman. Wissam told me: ‘I want justice for my daughter and if this movie can help in any way, please do it.’ From that point on, after receiving the 70 minutes of recording, not doing this movie wasn’t an option for me. It’s like staying silent was, in fact, being complicit.

I then transcribed the recording and reached out to the PRCS, including Rana Hassan Faqih (Red Crescent dispatcher coordinating rescue), Omar A. Alqam (a PRCS call-taker), Mahdi M. Aljamal (operations coordinator arranging the ambulance), and Nisreen Jeries Qawas (a logistics officer negotiating military clearance).

I also transcribed the testimony of the PRCS employees (Rana, Omar, Mahdi, and Nisreen) to write the moments that weren’t recorded. Because my work as a filmmaker is to choose and make choices, I needed to decide from which point of view I would tell this story. There are several points of view to consider: I could have told this story from the point of view of the location of the car, or with the mother, or maybe from the Israel Defence Force (IDF) tank, but I thought we need some distance. The first encounter with the voice for the PRCS, who were not in Gaza but were in the West Bank, suggested a degree of distance at the outset – and we too were listening to Hind’s voice from afar. When I made the decision to tell the story from the point of view of the PRCS, I needed to know what happened around the recording, what had happened in the office. The PRCS team also wanted me to tell this story because they paid a very, very heavy price. The deaths of Yusuf al-Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun were not the only killings of PRCS colleagues. From their testimony, I wrote the screenplay, and I shared it with them so I could have their feedback. I knew that this is a story that would be scrutinised, and it’s a story anchored in truth, particularly because of the great work done by Forensic Architecture, where we learn which kind of weapon, which tank, and, through satellite images, where the tank was in relation to Hind’s car. The Washington Post also published an investigative piece about this. At some point, I thought that the proof was there and that I can do a movie to explain the proof. I needed to use the cinema to go one step further than explaining the reality, the proof of what happened, and this is what I love in cinema: the fact that it encourages empathy. You live with another character coming from another culture for the duration of a film – you relate to them. 

And then there was question of whether I should film the real people involved, the members of the PRCS, or if I should use actors – and this was the choice we needed to make. I quickly understood that not all the four of the PRCS team wanted to be filmed. In the movie Mahdi, the coordination officer, says that if there is another photo added to this wall, he will resign. And this is what he did: after the killing of his two PRCS colleagues that he sent to rescue Hind, and he did everything in his power to protect them, he resigned. It was very hard for them, to relive this.

I also had this impression that, with the tools of cinema, we could go back to this moment when Hind was alive. When I first heard her voice, she was alive, and it is her voice that you hear in the film. But using actors instead of the PRCS team was a risky choice, because people think about actors as a fiction of sorts. I needed the audience to understand that they are not just actors, they are vessels for the real characters who lived through this. 

I ask a lot of things from the actors in this film, and we shot mostly in one take. I can see that they are not acting in the traditional sense. It was beyond performance, because I needed them to fulfil an impossible or very difficult equation, which is to be faithful to what is said in the recording, word by word, but at the same time to be in the present moment and act. So, what we did to fulfil this impossible equation was that the actors learned, as actors do, all of their lines from the transcript of the original recording, word by word. At the rehearsal, the actors spoke their lines but without hearing the recorded voice of Hind Rajab. When we started shooting, we played the actual recording so that they were hearing the voice of Hind Rajab (as recorded on 29 January 2024) in their headsets. They knew their lines in advance, but their reaction to hearing Hind’s voice was genuine.

SD: That process meant you get that immediacy and the spontaneity of Hind’s voice?

KBH: Yes, that was key to my thinking. 

SD: There was also the concern that you needed Hind’s mother, Wassim Rajab, on board with the film and that you honoured also her desire for justice. I noticed with 'The Voice of Hind Rajab', and other films that have been coming out of the region, but mainly about Palestine, we seem to be getting an increased focus on the individual – the named individual. When you’ve had over 20,000 children killed since October 2023, this seems more and more important.1 But in 'The Voice of Hind Rajab', you get more energy around one name: you get the one story and its call for justice. The film emotionally conveys this through the one voice and that becomes part of the legal quest for justice. The film shows so the difficulty  of complying with the legal framework [of authorisations required by the International Red Cross]. Historically, Palestinians have been living under various skewed processes since the time of the British Mandate. If you participate and comply with such laws, you might get a reward. But the system is imbalanced: if they don’t participate, then there’s a reason to exclude Palestinians. And if they do participate, it gives the [unjust] laws legitimacy. You see this again and again in the system of occupation. I was just wondering, finally, what did you learn about Palestine, from the actors or otherwise, that you didn’t know before?

KBH: One of the things that has stayed with me was when you hear that there was an ambulance eight minutes away. The first thing you think is: send the ambulance right away. I learned, through that, that you have the dominant and the dominated: the dominant impose rules on the dominated, but the dominant don’t even respect those rules. You see it in the film: Hind Rajab’s family were killed because there is no accountability within the system of law.

SD: Thank you, Kaouther. I was hoping we could take some questions from the audience.

Audience member 1:  I first want to say thank you for an incredible, powerful film. As you have said, sometimes reality is beyond storytelling, but clearly you made some important and really hard decisions in the film. I wanted to focus on one scene where Omar is playing games on his phone. Your first thought is: what the hell are they doing? But in traumatic situations, you do things you don’t imagine doing. Was it difficult to put in that scene because you didn’t want to discredit their hard work and their seriousness? Another question would be: were there any other scenes that were difficult to put in the film?

KBH: That’s a great question, because we talked a lot during the editing stage about this scene. Omar told me: they are human, and the human is not a logical being. He said to me that he played games to hijack his feelings. As they were waiting for the green light [to send the ambulance for Hind], the question is, what else can you can do? Playing games on his phone was his way to hijack his attention and to not feel all the stress and the pain involved. I thought that I should keep this scene because they [the members of the PRCS] told me about it, but also because it makes them human. 

Audience member 2: I wanted to ask why the film has not been distributed more widely.

KBH: Actually, for a movie like this it has been widely distributed. When you make an Arabic-speaking movie with subtitles, the market is not very welcoming. It’s not like an English-speaking movie with a star. I knew from the beginning that we were going to have to fight for this movie, because we wanted to echo the voice of this little girl. But after we finished editing, we came up with the idea to ask a ‘celebrity’ to endorse the movie because we live in a world where people are interested in celebrities and trust them. We were thinking maybe we’ll have one of them respond, and we were really surprised when – after watching the movie – all of them wanted to participate and support the movie. We were at the Venice Film Festival, and the reaction was so incredible when we won an award. The movie has been shortlisted for an Oscar and was on the BAFTA longlist. However, as Selma mentioned, I know there are a lot of people who are afraid to watch the movie, but this is how we can make the voice of this little girl resonate and echo, because this is not just a story, it is history and we can’t afford to look away.

Audience member 3: If there had been footage, visual footage, of the actual event [of Hind’s killing and her extended family], would you have been tempted to use it? Or do you think it is the immediacy of the voice itself that allows us access to the event beyond the fact of the image as spectacle.

KBH: This was a question that I was asking myself, because I had a lot of material, and how to edit or to work with that material became a key question. There were images on the internet of the car and the ambulance, but I kept asking what it was to really see these days when we are drowning in images. To really see, you must know why an image exists. I used the recording like footage, to get a sense of why the recording exists, and it was important for me to tell the story from this angle – what does the recording tell us that an image does not? There are a lot of things I wanted to add to the movie, but I imposed some rules on myself. I like constraint, because I came from a very ‘poor’ cinema. I started in documentaries. And you are always facing some constraint. I understood that constraint makes me more creative. But being faithful to the recording, and what is said on the recording, ultimately made me do this movie the way I did. 

[...]

Audience member 4: Given that this film deals with a high-profile case of state violence while the conflict is still going on, what were the biggest legal or logistic hurdles you faced in securing the audio as well as screening this kind of sensitive film in the Western world?

KBH: When I started, I had to stop another movie to work on this movie. And movies take time to be made, to be developed, financed, and so on. It takes a long time. But what was incredible was the energy I had around this movie, that people wanted me to tell this story – there was something about the silencing of the Palestinian voice that was unbearable. But at the same time, I had a lot of people telling me it’s too early – how can you make a movie while the genocide is still happening? Others said that if I wait, there will be a trial and everything will be sorted out, but I needed to do this movie right now to ask for accountability, to ask for justice, because we all want peace, but you can’t have peace without accountability and justice.