With Hasan in Gaza

The director Kamal Aljafari was born in 1972, into a Palestinian family with a history very similar to many of their compatriots: a mother and father who had been expelled from their houses and communities during the Nakba of 1947-1949, and transferred to houses owned by other Palestinians who had in turn been expelled, in neighbourhoods the Israelis had turned into ghettos for Palestinian refugees, in this case on land in the State of Israel. Part of his mother’s family was expelled to Gaza and, up to the Second Intifada (2000-2005), had been permitted to travel to Jaffa, their hometown and the social and economic capital of historic Palestine. Since then, however, Israel had closed all entry points to Gaza. The Strip, thus far mere occupied territory on which several settlements had already been built (and evacuated in 2005), was now treated by Israel as an internment camp. The largest internment camp in the world.

In 2001, at the age of 28, Aljafari could still visit Gaza. “At that time, I was already living in Germany. I had taken a camera from my [film] school, returned to Palestine, and filmed for three days”, assisted by Hasan Elboubou, a resident of Khan Younis who guided him through refugee camps, alleyways between makeshift homes, half-destroyed by Israeli bombs and patched up again; through Rafah, or close to the barbed wire fences (the wall was still being built), as they heard Israeli soldiers giving orders by megaphone, followed by shots; and to the beach, to see the fisherman, children, the market… “At the time, my idea was to make a film about my experience in prison. I was searching for someone in Gaza who had been incarcerated with me” during the First Intifada (1987-1993). Aljafari was 17 years old when he was held in an Israeli prison and shared a cell with 40 other Palestinian detainees, with the lights kept on night and day — a technique intended to make the prisoners lose all sense of time — and tried to remember images from his adolescence. Until he lost “the ability to imagine” and “life itself became a prison”, as he writes in the film’s final minutes. One of the inmates was Abdel Rahim, 18 years old, from Gaza, who was taken away by the guards one night never to return. This is who the filmmaker sought out, ten years later, in Gaza. “I didn’t find him, but I filmed that search, and then never watched the material. I’ve carried it with me for almost 25 years. And incredibly, I never watched the material. I never digitized those tapes, so I never saw them until now.” [1]

One year ago, in the middle of the genocide, the director returned to this material in order to pay “an homage to Gaza and its people, to all that was erased and that came back to me in this urgent moment of Palestinian existence, or non-existence. It is a film about the catastrophe, and the poetry that resists.” [2] In the film, everyone (and especially Hasan) wants to show, wants the camera to record the impact of the occupation, the violence, daily life. The flattened houses and those which, inhabited, were bombed the day before; the bicycles belonging to Palestinians who work in Israeli companies, in the settlements or on land in the State of Israel, and who can only pass on foot through the checkpoints, barriers erected on land in their own country by the Israeli army for tighter control and surveillance.

Almost two and a half years on from the start of Israel’s genocidal campaign against the two million inhabitants, the 72 thousand dead (up to February 2026), the more than 200 thousand injured, the thousands disappeared, we cannot help but ask ourselves what has become of every child who asks to be filmed, the houses, the bakeries in the market, the fishermen on the beach; and what has become of Hasan who, in the film, tries to put the young director’s mind at ease when he asks if the Israeli soldiers, whose voices can be heard in the distance giving orders by megaphone, will shoot at them for filming. He replies that they won’t, that they only do so when they see foreign delegations, in order to “stop people from being witnesses to what’s happening to us”. And we recall the almost 250 Palestinian journalists and photographers killed by the Israeli army in Gaza (up to June 2025 alone), the thousands of health workers murdered (1150 up to September 2024 alone)…

The images in With Hasan in Gaza were not necessarily gathered to fulfil a duty of remembrance, but that is how they appear now, in all their spontaneity, to our eyes. And in the same way, the Palestinians, whose voices are offered for us to hear, fulfil a duty of bearing witness (remembering, telling, building memory). Eighty years ago, during the Holocaust, Victor Klemperer (a German jew who survived the genocide inside Germany) would “get up each morning at half-past three” before going to work in the factory, to “note down what had happened during the previous day… I told myself: you hear with your own ears, and what matters is that you listen in specifically to the everyday, ordinary and average things, all that is devoid of glamour and heroism...” One of his neighbours in the Judenhaus, who was sent to Auschwitz in 1942, believed in his work and asked him every day to write down “the latest house search, the latest suicide, the latest cut in ration cards”. [3]

The images collected in With Hasan in Gaza function as proof of lives, even then under threat, before they were thrown into the abyss. Proof of human existence, of victims of oppression while they were still alive. On filming the ruins of houses, which are being destroyed to force the definitive expulsion of Palestinians from an area near where occupiers want to build a settlement, one young Palestinian who works on Israeli land asks not to be filmed. Hasan soothes him: “Don’t worry, this footage won’t be used, the Israelis will never see it.” What has become of him, 25 years later? In one of the conversations between Hasan and a resident, the latter refers to a “ceasefire” during which her house was bombed. “But what ceasefire? There’s never been a ceasefire, there is no ceasefire,” replies Hasan, who insists that she tell the camera about her life. And that’s when the woman, in the same tone, replies: “What for? We’re tired of talking… My life? This isn’t living.”

[1] Oberto, D. (2025, 3 de julho). Accidents, archives, and acts of sabotage: A conversation with Palestinian film director Kamal Aljafari. Untold Mag. https://untoldmag.org/accidents-archives-and-acts-of-sabotage-a-conversation-with-palestinian-film-director-kamal-aljafari/

[2] Meza, E. (2025, 6 de agosto). Kamal Aljafari’s Locarno competition opener ‘With Hasan in Gaza’ rediscovers lost existence of land and people. Variety. https://variety.com/2025/film/global/kamal-aljafari-locarno-film-festival-with-hasan-in-gaza-1236480509/

[3] Klemperer, V. (2005). LTI: A linguagem do Terceiro Reich. Antígona. (Original published in 1947)