This Gaza film is impossible to review because I don't know who to believe anymore
But the impact of the BBC's handling of this, and of their Gaza documentary that went before it – Gaza: How To Survive A War Zone, in which the child narrator was later revealed to be the son of a Hamas minister – will endure. It makes this film almost impossible to review, because you now wonder if you should trust what you are being told.
Undeniably, the film is harrowing and shocking. It contains unbearably distressing scenes of children's suffering: a boy sobbing over the body of his father, a little girl on an operating table after the skin had been flayed from her torso. Gaza is hell on earth, and the documentary showed us this in graphic terms. You can see these images on television news reports, but they are brief. An hour of them is hard to endure.
It is the central claims of the film that the BBC found too difficult to handle. They are a) that Israel is detaining, torturing and, in some cases, deliberately killing Israeli doctors and hospital workers, targeting them at work and at home; and b) that Israel is systematically crippling Gaza's hospitals as part of an overall plan to destroy Gaza. There is a playbook, the film says: attack the hospital and its surroundings with air strikes, besiege the building with ground troops and block medical supplies, detain medical staff, then withdraw troops and leave behind a non-functioning shell of a building. Move on to the next hospital and repeat. The documentary builds a pretty convincing picture of this.
Doctors spoke of torture and imprisonment, while mobile phone footage captured chilling scenes, including Israeli soldiers allegedly raping a prisoner inside the notorious Sde Teiman prison (nine soldiers were arrested last year). An Amnesty International worker told of Israeli 'black sites' where men are detained without judicial oversight, alongside disturbing images of prisoners; she also declared that Israel was acting 'with genocidal intent' against the Palestinian healthcare system. Israel, according to the film's many disclaimers, denies all of the allegations made.
The programme was hampered, as is all coverage of Gaza, by Israel's refusal to let foreign journalists in. It claims to be a 'forensic investigation,' but in the circumstances, that just isn't possible. An Israeli whistleblower, his face hidden, claimed to have worked as a doctor at a field hospital and to have witnessed a detainee being treated without anaesthetic as 'retribution' for October 7. This is grim. You think: was this a one-off or widespread?
The Israeli government maintains that Hamas uses hospitals as part of its military strategy, and that some medical staff have treated Israeli hostages. Reporter Ramita Navai tells us that two of the doctors whose stories were featured here had expressed support for the October 7 attacks, although she omits to share the words. She asks one doctor if he ever treated hostages, and he insists that he didn't but equivocates on the wider point, saying 'even if doctors in other hospitals… dealt with the hostages and treated them, does that mean for saving the life of a hostage or treating one you should be killed or interrogated?'
But some things are not in doubt. Doctors in Gaza are working under horrendous conditions, often without electricity, water and basic supplies, trying to save lives. Children in Gaza are living in unimaginable misery. On that, at least, the evidence is clear.
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