Hind Rajab’s voice was heard around the world last year. And yet her cries for help, piercing the souls of millions everywhere, were met with silence where it mattered most. Why?
On January 29, 2024, 6-year-old Hind and her family sought to escape the violence surrounding them in Gaza – only to be met with the very thing they were fleeing from. “I’m so scared. Please come. Please call someone to come and take me,” Hind begs on a call with Palestinian first responders, her family members traveling with her already dead. Twelve days later, after Israeli forces withdrew from the area, Hind’s body, along with the bodies of her six family members and the two paramedics sent to save her, was found.
Hind is one of the most well-known victims of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. If there’s any chance of the US meaningfully holding Israel accountable for what appear to be completely evident war crimes, it might begin with the case of a little girl whose cries have been heard worldwide.
Zeteo’s Prem Thakker pushed the US State Department day after day on how the US could continue sending weapons to the Israeli government despite the growing evidence that the Israeli military committed this crime.
Satellite imagery from multiple sources confirmed Israeli tanks were just meters away from the car Hind and her family were traveling in the day they were killed, contrary to Israel’s (US-parroted) claims that they weren’t in the area. In addition, an analysis done by Forensic Architecture found it “not plausible” that Israeli forces could not have seen who they shot 335 bullets at. And, of course, an emergency call from Hind and her cousin Layan shocked the world as the little girls screamed for help and described tanks right outside their door.
The case of Hind is horrific in its own right. It, and the US response to Zeteo’s questions, also embody how the US responded to Israeli human rights violations more broadly: lies and obfuscation, and, at best, slight tweaks in language over the course of months.
Millions of people worldwide have watched Zeteo’s daily questioning on Hind, and the pursuit helped illustrate this pattern of the US response. Prem Thakker tracked months of US responses to humanitarian violations – both in and outside Israel and Palestine – in order to meticulously understand and confront the contradictions in how the US responds to war crimes, depending on who is committing them.
With the help of Zeteo producer Lara Strydom, Prem turned months of his reporting into a 15-minute documentary, published to mark one year since her killing, that thoroughly, yet accessibly, explains the case of Hind’s killing – and all the lies and obfuscation that followed.
