(LifeSiteNews) –– If you have not yet seen it, I would recommend your watching a British documentary which follows the lives of amazing young people struggling to survive with their families during Israel’s massive bombardment of the Gaza Strip, up until the January ceasefire agreement which was supposed to bring IDF assaults upon the region to an end.
Released in February by the BBC, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone was filmed over nine months by two local Gazan cameramen Amjad Al Fayoumi and Ibrahim Abu Ishaiba, while being remotely directed by London-based producers Jamie Roberts and Yousef Hammash.
Thirteen-year-old Abdullah Al-Yazouri, who speaks fluent English, appears on camera and acts as narrator for the film. His voice throughout the film is a very unimpassioned objective tone. While walking through an apocalyptic-scale devastated area of Khan Younis, he says “this area used to be colorful, now it is gray.” After four displacements, he and his family were sheltering with a total of 40 people in his grandfather’s house before Israeli “war planes dropped massive bombs” on the area, he explained while walking the viewers over the remaining rubble.
Maintaining a positive disposition during his description, with a determination and ability to modestly smile, Abdallah is matched later by the charm and positivity of 10-year old Renad who copes with the hardships as if to make fun of them with chatter and laughter. The cheerful young girl also concentrates on recording a cooking show which she uploads to TikTok (800K followers) and YouTube which have made her, as one Palestinian man says in the film, a little star.
“During the war, there is no school, there’s no place for us to play, so I upload videos and talk to my followers. I get creative and it relieves my depression,” Renad explains. “I found a way on TikTok to see where my followers come from. They’re literally from all over the world. If there is too long between posting videos, they check on me, thinking I got killed.”
In the film she explains watching Israeli military quadcopters and planes dropping missiles with a nervous laugh. And as thunderous booms sound in the background, she reassures viewers, “We’re not afraid – we’re used to it.”
“Seriously though, all we think about is war. How will we survive each day and get through it,” she clarified.
The diligent Zakaria who volunteers at the hospital
Harrowing clips of bombings and Gazan families fleeing, carrying injured adults and children, a woman yells, “Israeli snipers are firing on people,” and ambulances are shown pulling into al-Aqsa hospital where the young 11-year-old Zakaria works as a volunteer.
Abdullah explains this is “the last permanent hospital in the safe zone, so it fills up fast.”
Among the chaos, one medic explains the situation as “critical – the occupation forces are committing massacres in the middle area,” with hundreds of casualties arriving, with many dead.
Zakaria is shown as the firs to dash to the ambulances to swing open the back door just after the vehicle has come to a stop with medical teams quickly behind him. He is shown steering gurneys through the crowd, briefing journalists and diligently moving sure-footed to accomplish his tasks.
When asked what the mess is on his hands he answers in a matter-of-fact tone, “blood from the injured and the dead.
The film also covers the story of an Israeli bombing which happened in the “safe zone” near where Abdullah and his family were sheltering. The boy describes what happened, how they were terrified, covered in dirt from the blast with the smell being horrible. The attack killed 19 people.
Surveying the bomb’s 20-foot-deep crater a boy Abdullah meets explains “suddenly, the sky turned red and explosions rang out. We ran to pull people from under the rubble.” He reports how the blast killed his aunt, uncle and cousin. “We found the girl’s head here, along with a bone covered in flesh under the blankets. When we saw the body parts, we couldn’t speak and felt sick.”
The young boys then engaged in a conversation trying to reconcile the casualties with the official statements from the IDF. “The Israeli army said the strikes had targeted three senior Hamas militants,” Abdullah conveyed regarding the bombing of displaced, homeless families in tents.
“We live here. There are no Hamas leaders in this area,” one boy said. And another asked, “Even for one or two, is it right to kill so many people?”
The horrific peak of the film happens covering the October 14, 2024 Israeli bombing of Palestinians in tents full of refugees and patients outside of al-Aqsa hospital where smartphone images of 19-year-old Sha’ban al-Dalou burning to death in his hospital bed were shown around the world.
Pictures of a deadly blaze in Gaza – caused by an Israeli strike on a hospital tent camp – have shocked the world this week.
Information about victims has started to emerge – this is what we know about Shaban al Dalu. pic.twitter.com/sDCPEGsCdO
— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) October 16, 2024
“I saw the boy burning with my own eyes,” says Zakaria. Narrating, Abdulla adds, “The Israeli army later said that it was a precise strike on terrorists who were operating inside a command and control center.”
Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone provides an invaluable ground-level view of life under Israeli attacks in the enclave. One sees these people are not unlike those in our own neighborhoods and communities.
The story closes with the happiness of the January ceasefire and Abdallah stating, “My greatest hope is that the ceasefire continues, and Gaza goes back to what it was before, or even better. But my biggest fear is that the war will return.”
Since this release, Israel did end the ceasefire, put Gaza under a full starvation blockade of all humanitarian aid and resumed large-scale bombing of the region.
To quickly contact your members of Congress and implore their support for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza click here.
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