Gaza: the record ·
Hind Rajab: the six-year-old who called for help in Gaza
Hind Rajab spent her last hours on the phone with rescuers, trapped in a car beside her dead relatives. An investigation found the car had been hit by 335 bullets, fired from a few metres away.
29 January 2024
Hind Rajab was six years old. On 29 January 2024 she was fleeing Gaza City with her uncle, aunt and cousins when their car came under Israeli fire. Her 15-year-old cousin, Layan, called the Palestine Red Crescent Society for help; the call ended in gunfire. Hind, the last one alive, stayed on the line with the dispatchers for hours, begging them to come.
The ambulance
The Red Crescent sent an ambulance after its route was coordinated with the Israeli army. Contact was lost as it arrived. Twelve days later, on 10 February, Hind and her family were found dead in the car. The ambulance was found nearby, destroyed. The two paramedics, Yusuf Zeino and Ahmad al-Madhoun, had been killed.
335 bullets
An investigation by Forensic Architecture, with Earshot and Al Jazeera's Fault Lines, counted 335 bullet holes in the family's car, most of them on one side. It found that an Israeli tank was most likely 13 to 23 metres away when it opened fire, and that it is "not plausible" that the shooter could not see the car was full of civilians, including children.
Why she matters
Hind's voice was recorded. Most of the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in Gaza were not. The officers in NAZA describe, from the other side of the screen, a system in which the killing of children in their homes and cars was a known and accepted cost.
Watch NAZA
NAZA is Israeli military slang for collateral damage: the number of civilians an officer is allowed to kill in a strike. In this documentary, 24 Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers, many from the army's most prestigious units, explain how that number was set, approved and exceeded in Gaza. What they describe is not a tragic accident of war but a system: targets tracked to their family homes, families watched for days, strikes approved knowing children were inside.
In cinemas now, and free worldwide on theguardian.com after the cinema run.
