From the Editors 16 May 2021
You can watch it above.
Killing Gaza tells stories of Palestinians in the aftermath of Israel’s 2014 assault which killed 2,200 people in Gaza, among them 550 children.
Here’s part of what Blumenthal wrote about the film for The Electronic Intifada when it was first released in 2018:
The opening section of Killing Gaza documents sadistic Israeli violence that makes for undeniably difficult viewing. A five-day ceasefire had just taken effect and we had unfettered access to a stunned population returning to the border areas that had been blanketed with Israeli artillery and missiles.
In the town of Khuzaa, in southeastern Gaza, we met Hani al-Najjar, who returned to his home after the Israeli military pulled back, only to find six corpses in his bathroom, all charred, bound and gagged, and blown to bits by an Israeli grenade.
Outside the city of Rafah, in southern Gaza, we met 19-year-old Mahmoud Abu Said, who had been taken as a human shield by Israeli soldiers and held in front of a window in his own home while those soldiers sniped at his neighbors from over his shoulders.
And in Gaza City, we encountered residents of Zafir 4 and the Italian Compound, residential towers that had been blasted to pieces by Israeli jets in the final days of the war for no other purpose than to teach Gaza’s educated middle class a lesson.
Standing by the rubble of what was once his home outside Rafah, and next to a destroyed taxi that used to belong to his son who was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper, Suleiman al-Zugheibi delivered a testimony of trauma and defiance that was all too common among those we met.
“We’ve suffered for the past 60 years because of Israel,” al-Zugheibi told us. “War after war after war. Bombing after bombing after bombing. You build a house, they destroy it. You raise a child, they kill him,” he said. “Whatever they do – the United States, Israel, the whole world, we’ll keep resisting until the last one of us dies. Even if they turn all of Gaza into rubble like this, even if the rocks are all that’s left, we won’t surrender.”
