M6 – SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 8 AT 11:10 PM – REPORT
Hell is not often paved with good intentions, but rather with bombs. The report that “Enquête exclusive” devotes to Gaza, where the war led by Israel has been raging for eleven months, shows a territory wounded beyond all imagination.
From the first minutes, he recalls the fatal chain of events. The deadly attack carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023, targeted military posts surrounding the Palestinian territory, the surrounding Israeli kibbutzim and a techno music festival taking place nearby. The massacres committed by the Islamist organization and the armed gangs that entered Israel in its wake caused 1,195 Israeli deaths, soldiers but above all a large majority of civilians, including women, children and the elderly. In addition, 251 hostages were forcibly taken into the Palestinian territory.
The Israeli response was commensurate with this unprecedented attack in its violence and scale: the “Al-Aqsa Flood” was followed by the “Iron Sword”. These facts are known to all. What is rarer is to share almost an hour of the daily life of Gazans, driven from their homes by incessant bombardments and ground offensives.
Information blockade
For the first time since the start of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel has strictly forbidden any foreign journalist from accessing a war zone. The Gaza Strip is completely cut off from the world. To circumvent this information blockade, Martine Laroche-Joubert decided to work with Shrouq Aila, a local Palestinian journalist, also a young mother of a little girl and widow of a journalist, killed on October 22, 2023 in a bombing. A hundred Palestinian journalists have been targeted since the start of the war: an unprecedented massacre.
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Shrouq Aila travels through a part, mainly the south, of the 360 square kilometers of the Gaza Strip. She goes to meet the inhabitants, most of them displaced people who left the north of the enclave. At the time of filming, 1 million displaced people – out of nearly 2.5 million inhabitants – are crowded into Rafah, the southernmost city of the Gaza Strip, very close to Egypt, which they can see from their makeshift tents. But the offensive announced by Israel in early May in the Rafah area is driving them back towards Deir Al-Balah.
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The scale of the destruction – 70% of homes rendered uninhabitable, more than 80% of health facilities damaged or destroyed, running water and electricity cut off, 39 million tons of debris and rubble – is beyond comprehension. Hospitals, which operate in more than precarious conditions, are overrun with displaced families sleeping in the corridors. However, it is the human losses that are the most terrible: 39,000 dead – including 14,000 children – at the time of the documentary, almost 41,000 today, more than 80,000 injured, including 12,000 children. Epidemics and famine are already here.
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Survive until tomorrow
This procession of horrors is too often reduced to a litany of figures and formulas on the “collateral damage” or the “shooting errors”. We must see and listen to the Gazans, their distress but also their humor and their calm in the catastrophe. The main interest of this documentary is to show Gaza and its inhabitants up close. Despite the death and destruction, the maternity wards are always full. The wombs of women are the last weapon of the Gazans, their ultimate refuge: to replace their dead children with new ones, as if to refuse their disappearance.
Few political remarks filter through in the stories, the main thing is to survive until the next day without thinking about later. But in some testimonies, and through the tone of the report, a fearful criticism of Hamas surfaces, which decided the fate of the Gazans without assuming the consequences. Hidden in the immense labyrinth of tunnels built underground, the leader of the Islamist organization, Yahya Sinouar, is still running.
As laborious negotiations over a ceasefire and an exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners stall, Gazans know that the cessation of fighting will not mark the end of the war. Water and electricity will not return soon. Reconstruction will take at least a generation. As for peace…
Gaza Investigation: Lives in Hellrdocumentary by Martine Laroche-Joubert and Shrouq Aila (Fr., 2024, 52 min).
