By Sanja de Silva Jayatilleka –
Sanja de Silva Jayatilleka
“May their hard hearts soften towards you” – Voice on the phone to Red Crescent team trying to save Hind Rajab
Nothing really prepares one for the intense experience, for that is what it was, of sharing in the helpless anguish of the Palestine Red Crescent team at the emergency call center in Gaza, making frantic efforts to rescue the 5 year old girl trapped for several hours in a car among the corpses of 5 members of her family, gunned down by members of the Israeli Defense Force. Nor was it easy to hear the pleas of the little girl, begging to be rescued in her sweet, child’s voice for hours on the phone, as the feature film dramatizing her last hours, played the original recordings of her voice made at the emergency call center, interspersed with actors playing the roles of the desperate Red Crescent team. After that searing encounter, deep reflection is an inevitable compulsion.
8 Minutes too far
Hind Rajab’s story was already well known, from the moment the Red Crescent call center released the voice recordings on social media, in an attempt to pressure the Israeli authorities into giving a safe route for the ambulance to reach the child, hiding in a bullet riddled car. The distance between the closest ambulance and the child was 8 minutes, according to calculations of the call center. More than two hours later, they were still pleading for approval for a safe route, to ensure this ambulance crew wouldn’t join the rest of the names of more than a dozen rescue workers on their wall, killed by the Israeli forces while on rescue missions.
The feature film “The Voice of Hind Rajab” depicting those last hours of Hind Rajab’s precious life, premiered in Colombo at the Platinum Screen, Majestic City, sponsored by the Embassy of the State of Palestine, the Sri Lanka Committee for Solidarity with Palestine and Ceylon Theatres (Pvt) Ltd, on the 18th of June 2026.
Hind Rajab, the 5 year old Palestinian girl was murdered in Gaza in January 2024. The film, produced by Brad Pitt and Joaquin Phoenix among others, won several awards: The Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival, CICT_UNESCO Enrico Fulchignoni Award, Audience Award at the San Sebastian Film Festival, and Audience Award for International Feature at the Middleburg Film Festival, as well as the Main Prize (Brussels section) at the One World Festival.
The system vs Red Crescent
In the film, the vantage point is that of the members of the Palestinian Red Crescent emergency call center team who were involved in the exchange with the little girl as she lay hidden in the car, after her cousin, another little girl a few years older, was killed while on the phone to them minutes earlier. The older girl said that there were tanks next to the car and that they were shooting at her. They heard the shots, then she fell silent.
Miraculously, Hind survived that spell of shooting, and the team was able to be in contact with her while they tried to get a rescue team to reach the car in which she was hiding. The family was in compliance with an Israeli order to vacate that area of Gaza where they lived and was on their way out when their car was attacked, killing most of the occupants, except for two girls. Their only hope for survival was the Red Crescent emergency response center.
What unveils in the film is the unbearable emotional rollercoaster the members of the Red Crescent team go through, as their humanity is repeatedly tested against the requirements of a brutally lopsided, oppressive system of administrative authority which is structured with layer upon layer of permissions, approvals, co-ordinations which delay and hamper their efforts to respond urgently to an emergency.
In a story that holds tragedy within tragedy, an accumulation of hopeless despair, some of the issues of the impossible conditions of existence of the people of Gaza are laid bare. As individual members of the Red Crescent team respond to these events, their own hearts are broken by the predicament of little Hind Rajab, as they helplessly promise they would come to her aid, desperately hoping they would be able to live up to their promise. Rana, a female member of the team, keeps her talking until Rajab herself says she is dying. Rana, overcome with grief, gets her to repeat a verse from the Holy Quran, with little Hind doing so beautifully and fluently. She urges Rana to come soon to save her, which Rana knows by then, is an impossible request.
The daily encounter with the conditions of a heartless occupation come alive, as the supervisor at Red Crescent bends over backwards to comply with the list of rules and regulations even to allow an ambulance crew 8 minutes away to save a child, in a convoluted process with arbitrary decisions at each stage. As the team continues the calls to get approvals, a safe route and coordination with the IDF, a doctor at the other end of the phone hearing that permission had still not been granted says with resignation, “May their hard hearts soften towards you”.
A knife’s edge
The dramatization of the day’s events shows the knife’s edge their nerves have to balance on, with a younger employee’s patience and tolerance of an unfair system reaching their limits in the face of the callous disregard by the system of a little girl begging to be saved. The staff at Red Crescent survive the stress by having a trained counsellor on hand, to help them deal with the deaths while on the phone to victims. The counsellor herself is finally called upon to keep little Hind company in her last minutes, teaching her to breathe deeply while imagining her favourite places.
The tragedy is that their unrelenting efforts including the release of all tapes of the little girl appeals uploaded to social media eventually succeeded in getting a safe route for the ambulance to get to her, but still failed to complete the mission to save her. The ambulance itself was shot at when it got to within 50 meters of the car which held Hind Rajab still alive, killing both rescue workers and destroying the vehicle. The logic of a hostile occupation over the Palestinian population took its predictable course, having granted permission to arrive at the site, the rescue ambulance was nevertheless attacked, simply because the occupation force could, despite every effort to stick to the rules by the Red Crescent.
The younger man’s impassioned indictment of his law-abiding supervisor at one moment shouting “We are still occupied because of men like you!” as the supervisor continued to comply with every impossible rule set upon them even at the cost of delaying the rescue effort, revealed the churning depths of a subterranean sea of emotion an occupied people must endure, keeping it controlled in survival mode until it bubbles up in tidal waves of frustration and anger. The young man who was unable to hide his emotions that day, was reportedly arrested subsequently and was killed by the occupying authorities.
Not without consequence
It is impossible not to be shocked at the bullet riddled ambulance and the totally destroyed car shown at the end of the movie. For 12 days there was no news of what happened to the girl or where the car was, until the IDF left the area. Then they found her, with the other bodies, with almost three hundred bullets in Hind Rajab. Whatever those conducting atrocities may think at the time they celebrate such “triumphs” over innocents, such continued conduct clearly impairs their humanity.
The story being told from the perspective of the Red Crescent employees, brings home the fact that these are every day traumas borne by the people of Palestine, not isolated incidents of excesses. There were young people at the Majestic Cinema who were sobbing in shocked empathy. How is it that year after year, the Palestinians bear these tragedies, as their country keeps getting smaller and smaller, their lands taken over, their buildings destroyed, and their history reduced to patches of hopelessness in a sea of gray rubble?
We have watched it together with the rest of the world for decades. Some of our own leaders have prevented or tried to prevent, and even punished those who couldn’t be prevented from speaking out against the injustices carried out in broad daylight against the Palestinian people. Fortunately, they do not represent most of the people of Sri Lanka. The Security Council held an emergency session this week, called by all 10 non-permanent members and supported by 4 of the permanent members, to debate the prevention of humanitarian aid to Gaza. One permanent member didn’t sign it.
Given the current global dynamics facilitating a peace agreement, at least in the form of an MoU, between Iran and the United States, one can only hope that things will change and one day sooner than later, all members of the Security Council will speak with one voice on the situation of Palestine, and that the courage of the film makers and all those involved in its creation will be rewarded with justice for the incredibly resilient people of the State of Palestine. May their hard hearts soften towards the long-suffering Palestinian people, innocent civilians caught up in an unending war, who in helping each other have retained their humanity in the most trying of circumstances, while their occupiers are rapidly losing theirs.
