Gaza in the Camera’s Memory: A Life that Preceded Genocide and Resists Oblivion

Alaa Karajah, Writer and TV presenter

Every time I return to films shot in Gaza, I feel as though I am entering a city I know intimately yet have, even as a Palestinian, never allowed to visit. As a media professional and a writer specializing in cinema, these works have been my only window onto a place kept forcibly distant by Israeli occupation, despite its geographical proximity to my city, Ramallah.

I tried repeatedly to visit yet in vain. One such attempt was to explore the image of the Palestinian hero in my book The New Palestinian Cinema: The Image of the Hero and Its Significations, (2021) but permits by the Israelis never came. I was supposed to meet an audience at the “Press House,” a space that once served as a hub for young people and journalists, before it was reduced to rubble during the war of genocide, and its founder, Bilal Jadallah, was killed when his car was targeted in Gaza. Bilal—whom I never met, yet whose integrity and professionalism I heard much about from my friends in Gaza.

Faced with this bitter colonial reality, viewing films became the only act of proximity, and a question began to press with urgency: what became of the faces that passed before the camera? Are they still alive? And if they survived, did they survive the horrors they endured during the war?

This question opens onto a broader one: what was life in Gaza like before 2023? Beyond the reduction imposed by images of war, cinema—documentary cinema in particular—offers a cohesive human record of a place that has lived under prolonged blockade, yet continues to produce its daily life with striking persistence. In “With Hassan in Gaza” (2025) by Kamal Aljafari, we return to Gaza in the late 1990s. The director constructs his film from a personal journey in search of a friend with whom he was imprisoned in 1989, knowing nothing about him except his name. Aljafari arrives in Gaza for the first time and spends a full day moving with a local guide, from Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun in the north to Khan Younis in the south, passing through intimate places of crowded cities, markets and chanty beaches. What begins as an individual search gradually transforms into a visual unveiling of an entire area: a life shaped between the aftermath of the First Palestinian Intifada (uprising) in 1987 and the constraints of Israeli occupation, between danger looming in the background and an unceasing daily routine. Through handheld camerawork and raw sound, the film captures fleeting details—faces, roads, conversations—to reconstruct Gaza as it was lived, not as it is reduced.

The same question accompanies me as I move across films from different periods: how was life lived there before the war of 2023? From within these daily details emerge stories that test borders quite literally, as in “Between Two Crossings” by the martyred directors Yaser Murtaja, killed by Israeli forces in 2018, and Rushdi Al-Sarraj, killed during the genocide in 2023. Over 42 minutes, the film follows the journey of the student Nour Al-Ghussein as she attempts to leave Gaza on a scholarship. Along the way, it reveals the reality of young people’s aspirations colliding with blockade and unemployment. Between the Rafah crossing on the borders with Egypt, which rarely opens, and the Erez checkpoint controlled by Israel and links the Strip to the West Bank and subject to the whims of soldiers, failed travel attempts recur, accompanied by waiting and humiliation—even for permit holders. The dream of study becomes an individual Odessa for Nour.

Amid the restrictions on movement imposed by Israel revealed by such experiences, a parallel energy emerges—one that seeks openings for life within the narrow margins available. In “Living” (2010) by Swiss director Nicolas Wadimoff, the camera moves among young men playing music, others caring for horses, and scenes of a sea hemmed in by patrol boats. The shots juxtapose visible destruction with attempts to invent spaces of joy: a rap song, or a horse running freely in open space. The film leaves the impression that Palestinian desire for life defies ideal conditions to declare itself; it finds its way even in the harshest environments, in a continuous effort to restore life’s rhythm after each war.

From that same sea emerges another thread in “Gaza Surf Club” (2016), directed by Philip Gnadt and Mickey Yamine, where the simple beach becomes a personal space of freedom. The young people who face the waves do not distance themselves from their reality; rather, they reshape it in their own way. Moments of balance on the board carry a meaning that transcends sport, opening a window onto a different relationship with place—one grounded in challenge and the search for a breathing space.

Parallel to this vitality, other films work to consolidate memory in the face of loss. In “Gaza Under the Rubble” (2011) by Australian director Anne Sohlis, the tragedy of the Al-Samouni family—who lost many of their members during the 2008–2009 Israeli invasion—comes to the fore. The film relies on drawings by the family’s children, who attempted through lines and colors to comprehend the violence they witnessed and the execution of their relatives at the hand of the Israeli artillery and jet fighters. These drawings are brought to life through animation, and the young girl Amal Al-Samouni becomes a voice carrying a memory heavier than her years. The image thus becomes a means of reflection and registration of what happened and preserving those who are gone.

Films have been the window, for the world and me, onto Gaza through years of previous wars and siege, and even after the most recent Israeli war of genocide. Director Rashid Masharawi, himself from Gaza, attempts to grasp what remains in his film From “Ground Zero” (2024), where a number of filmmakers from Gaza come together in a collective work documenting fragmented moments of life under bombardment. The short segments, in their diversity, form a single narrative of fear and resilience, rewriting the everyday from within the experience itself. In “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk” (2025), directed by Sepideh Farsi, this desire to leave a trace takes shape through the story of photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, who transformed from a witness into part of the story after her martyrdom. Her presence in the film gives the image a doubled meaning: to be captured in order to endure, even when its maker is gone. Before her death, she wrote: “If I must die, I want a loud death… I do not want to be just breaking news, or a number in a group. I want a death the world hears, a trace that endures over time, an image that remains, whose impact is not erased by time or place.” Her wish was indeed fulfilled. People in Gaza cannot afford to dream of survival; they can only hope that, when they depart, it will not be a silent departure like the life they lived.

In attempting to answer my question about what life in Gaza was like before the genocide war, these films intersect visually and emotionally. They do not appear as mere adjacent narratives, but as a living testimony that converges to reconstruct the features of place and people. They meet at a single human point: Gaza as seen through the eyes of its people, and told through the details of their daily lives. Gaza as seen through its people—fishermen casting their nets, farmers cultivating the roses and strawberries for which Gaza is known, young men supporting Barcelona or Real Madrid matches in cafés and public squares, and children drawing what they see and dreaming beyond it. These are daily details, yet they carry a different weight once we know how many of these places ended.

This continuum of life does not begin in recent decades alone. Going back to the 1940s, documents reveal an active cinematic and cultural presence in Gaza. On the stage of Al-Samer Cinema in Gaza city, theatrical and film works were performed, and the city hosted Egyptian artistic troupes arriving by train, among them Ali Al-Kassar’s troupe in 1942, before continuing their shows to Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Haifa. Alongside it, Al-Amer Cinema and other venues emerged, until, in the 1950s, when the Union of Cinema Houses in Gaza was formed—an indication of a deeply rooted cultural vitality. This history, which I am documenting in my book “Cinema Column: Cinema in Palestine Before the Nakba” (forthcoming) places what we see today within a longer context, where the loss becomes twofold: the loss of the present and its past.

With the latest war, loss has not been limited to human lives. Dozens of cultural centers have been destroyed, and Gaza’s visual archive—bearing images, memory, and history—has been scattered. Irreplaceable materials have been lost, and at the same time, the dreams of thousands of young people have been extinguished—those who saw cinema as a path to the future and dreamed of becoming filmmakers telling their own stories.

Amid all this, films remain a living trace: testimonies to a full life and to the history of a city that cannot be reduced to a single scene. They preserve what can be salvaged from memory and grant those who appeared in them an additional chance to remain within the story. As the poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed at the beginning of the war of genocide, wrote:

“If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story…”