Hearing Hind: Why The Voice of Hind Rajab Demands More Than Tears

By Kimberley Davidson

Sitting down in Screen 3 at the recently reopened Filmhouse in Edinburgh, I questioned whether being there was the right thing to do. I wasn’t sure I could sit through a film we witnessed in real time. As an activist and organiser, my focus now is on staying emotionally able to continue—because if we fall apart, we are of no use to Palestinians. I prioritise doing over feeling. When Palestinians are finally allowed to grieve, when justice is won, perhaps there will be space for the rest of us to do the same.

Although the screening wasn’t sold out, seating had been automatically allocated so we sat shoulder to shoulder. I resisted the urge to move and sit alone and instead watched the seats around me slowly fill. The audience was mixed. I wondered how many were activists who had marched week after week, and how many were simply Filmhouse regulars. I clutched the stack of Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign flyers I’d brought to hand out afterwards, unsure where to put them. Hind’s smiling face looked up at me from my lap. Then her name appeared on the screen.

The moment her name came up—next to the film’s 15 rating—the person to my right, my mum, instinctively touched my arm. Hind’s name did not belong there.  It belonged in the sand of Gaza’s beaches, and on drawings brought home from preschool. Nor does it belong in the sanitised synopses written by countless independent cinemas, which describe the violence inflicted on a child and her family while refusing to name the perpetrator.

You would be hard-pressed to find anyone even loosely engaged with the genocide in Gaza who does not know what happened to Hind Rajab and her family in 2024. Even the BBC managed to learn her name while she was still considered missing: “Unknown fate of six-year-old Hind Rajab trapped under fire.” Adding the word Israeli—to clarify who was firing—might, I suppose, have pushed the headline over its word count.

Like almost all of Gaza’s population, Hind’s family was being forcibly displaced by the Israeli Occupation Forces. As they fled their home in search of safety—some on foot, others in what they hoped would be the relative protection of a car—Hind joined her extended family. Her mother didn’t want her to have to walk such a distance in the cold January weather. In the hours that followed, Hind became the sole surviving witness to the murder of her entire family in that vehicle.
She waited—without food or water—surrounded by the bodies of those she loved, with Israeli tanks positioned nearby. As time passed, the Palestine Red Crescent Society call handlers in Ramallah frantically tried to keep her alive, staying on the line with her for as long as they could. When rescue workers finally attempted to reach Hind, they too were killed—PRCS paramedics Yusuf al-Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun in a move entirely consistent with Israel’s well-documented and sadistic playbook. Contact with Hind was eventually lost. For twelve days, no one was permitted to reach the site of the massacre.

The film is directed by Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, who centred Hind’s voice through the live recordings of her calls, with actors speaking the exact words of those who listened helplessly as she pleaded, again and again, “Come and get me,” growing more frightened as night fell. Every second is excruciating—made all the more unbearable by the knowledge that her death was entirely preventable, as were the deaths of every Palestinian child killed in this genocide.

Learning the details of Hind’s short life—her nickname, Hanood, the name of her preschool, A Happy Childhood—only deepens the wound for all who mourn her. We shrink under the weight of our collective failure: to protect her, to stop Israel’s genocide, and to end the flow of weapons and political support from our own culpable government.

What the film captures with devastating clarity is the collective trauma imposed on Palestinians—from the river to the sea. How do Rana and Omar, the call handlers who fought to save Hind, ever recover? How do the surviving members of her family return to life? How does anyone find meaning in a world where even the shredded bodies of children provoke no empathy from those with the power to stop it?

And yet, Hind’s mother found a reason. She found it in Hind’s voice—and in the voices of the countless Palestinian children whose names we may never know, including those who were killed before they were even given one.

So must we.

If The Voice of Hind Rajab reignites the righteous rage required to demand justice for her, then the film has done exactly what it needed to do.

As Ahed Tamimi reminds us:
“Thank you for your tears, but we do not want your pity. We want you to see us as the freedom fighters we are.”