Hamas wages war on Israel through a coordinated strategy of terrorism and propaganda. They fight illegally behind human shields to frustrate enemy targeting. And whenever a human shield gets killed, they blame Israel.
The terror group’s propagandists specialize in crafting statistics, anecdotes and images of wartime suffering among Palestinian Arab children to evoke sympathy while slandering Israel. To the extent that outside parties such as moviemakers recycle the child-focused fabrications, they promote Hamas’s own public-relations goals.
One Oscar-nominated film, “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” recounts the tragic fate of a child in the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip following the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The production is so obedient to Hamas’s version of events that it serves as and becomes a facile meme of Palestinian victimhood and Israeli oppression.
The film is called a “docudrama.” Its director, Kaouther Ben Hania, also the writer, obtained a real-life audio file from a Palestinian emergency call center in Gaza. She interpreted the caller’s pleas through the cinematically staged perspective of the center’s staff.
In the audio recording, a terrified 5-year-old girl named Hind Rajab stammers about hiding in a car that is parked at a gas station and being attacked by “tanks.” She reveals that her relatives in the car have died, and she pleads for someone to save her as the sounds of gunfire crackle in the background.
The frightened child can relate only fragmentary facts about the surrounding violence. But the film’s fictional overlay cultivates those tidbits into a mountainous indictment of Israel. There is no weighing of evidence or consideration of analytical possibilities, as one would expect from a fair inquiry. Instead, the film breathlessly conjectures that the Israeli Defense Forces blew up most of the car’s occupants, waited six hours, demolished the ambulance that was dispatched to rescue Hind Rajab and then murdered the little girl.
By omitting any mention of Hamas, the film implies that the IDF attack was an unprovoked ambush.
The anti-Israel theatrics make no sense. Hind Rajab never said her attackers were Israelis. In fact, an Israeli investigation found that there was no IDF presence at the scene of the incident. An independently produced satellite photo of the event, which purported to show IDF battle tanks in the vicinity, plotted the vehicles many blocks away from the gas station with no line of sight to anything there. The background noise in the audio included gunfire, but not the blast of tank shells or the rumble of tanks. Anyway, no array of tanks would need six hours to kill a helpless child.
The notion that the IDF would ever target civilians defies a consensus of experts in international humanitarian law (IHL). John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, is a world-renowned IHL scholar who has thoroughly investigated the Gaza war firsthand. He believes and has stated that Israel has “implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history—above and beyond what international law requires and more than the United States did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Israel has received similar praise from the High Level Military Group of NATO military leaders, a former deputy commander of NATO forces, a retired British colonel who repeatedly toured the Gaza warzone, the author of a widely cited textbook on international law, and the director of military law studies at Texas Tech Law School.
What Hind Rajab called “tanks” may have been something more ubiquitous in Gaza: Hamas pickup trucks outfitted with heavy machine guns. If so, then she and her family probably became Hamas-conscripted human shields during a gun battle between operatives of the terrorist organization and Israeli soldiers. That would explain why the call center staff never asked Hamas to help save the girl’s life.
Under the internationally recognized International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, it is antisemitic to raise “mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing or stereotypical allegations” about Jews as a collective.
The principals behind the film indulge in all these types of aspersions by perpetuating the Palestinian Arab myth of Israeli ethnic cleansing. In the process, they unethically exploit the agony of a little girl’s dying words for their own business gain.
“The Voice of Hind” should be shunned. If such antisemitic propaganda gets an Academy Award, the biggest winner would be Hamas.
