Very rarely is a documentary steeped in controversy before even being aired.
But Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, produced by Basement Films, was until less than two weeks ago supposed to be broadcast by the BBC.
On 20 June, Britain’s public broadcaster announced, after a long series of delays, that it had dropped the film.
“We have come to the conclusion that broadcasting this material risked creating a perception of partiality that would not meet the high standards that the public rightly expect of the BBC,” it said in a statement.
The BBC, however, failed to explain why the film would have not met these “high standards”.
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Within days of being dropped, the UK’s Channel 4, which has a long history of broadcasting high-quality documentaries, announced that it, instead, would broadcast the film in Britain.
Meanwhile Zeteo, founded by Mehdi Hasan, announced that it would broadcast the documentary internationally.
Made by Oscar-nominated, Emmy award and Peabody award-winning filmmakers, including Ben de Pear, Karim Shah and Ramita Navai, the documentary, which aired late on Wednesday, tells the stories of Palestinian doctors working in Gaza under Israeli bombardment.
‘Israel has been killing the very people trying to keep [Gaza’s] healthcare system alive’
– Ramita Navai
Minutes into the film, it becomes immediately clear why BBC executives, who have long been accused of having a pro-Israel bias, might have decided to scrap it.
The opening shots begin with footage retrieved from the phone of a Palestinian medic killed under a rain of heavy Israeli gunfire.
“Israel has been killing the very people trying to keep [Gaza’s] healthcare system alive,” says Ramita Navai, the film’s presenter.
She adds that “Israel says Hamas uses hospitals as part of its military strategy.”
There is a lot of “the Israeli army said” and “the IDF told us” in this film. Often it is pointed out that the military provided no evidence for its claims.
The documentary has clearly been aired with the expectation that it will come under heavy scrutiny.
Evidently the filmmakers have gone to great lengths to anticipate and fend off potential attacks such as that faced by the recent BBC documentary on children in Gaza, whose 13-year-old narrator was the son of a technocrat in Gaza’s government, which is administered by Hamas.
The film did not mention that – and the revelation (and an ensuing campaign by pro-Israel groups and the Israeli embassy in London) led to its being pulled by the BBC.
By contrast in Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, a voiceover tells us on multiple occasions that some doctors interviewed have expressed support for Hamas or have relatives who are Hamas members.
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The film features an interview with Dr Khaled Hamouda, who was a specialist surgeon at Gaza’s Indonesian hospital. He tells us how Israel bombed his family home and struggles to suppress his tears as he describes how he saw a nurse carrying the dead body of his young daughter Reem.
The following morning he was told his wife had also been killed in the attack. “I don’t know where they were buried. I never saw them again.”
Hamouda points at himself in a picture of hundreds of detained Palestinians in a pit. The photo was taken barely a week after Israel killed his daughter and wife. He says he was violently beaten in Israeli custody.
A voiceover then tells us that he has previously expressed support for the 7 October attacks and Hamas.
Given the stunningly horrific testimony we have just heard from Hamouda, this is an odd intrusion and feels jarring.
Would any interview with an Israeli victim of the 7 October attacks on British television include a voiceover informing us of their political views as a caveat? One suspects not.
But as a precautionary measure, this almost certainly makes the film far less vulnerable to potential attacks.
Abuse and torture of Palestinian detainees
The facts and testimony in the documentary are overbearingly strong, and the regular mentions of official Israeli statements and denials are all eclipsed by an interview with an anonymous Israeli soldier.
He speaks about how he witnessed his fellow soldiers “enthusiastically” abusing and beating Palestinian detainees, some of them health workers, in prison.
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He recalls one commander who was “in on it and showing his respect” for the physical abuse of detainees. Such brutality was “encouraged”.
We are shown interviews with doctors recounting the abuse and torture they suffered in Israeli prisons. “They hung me up, everyone was hung up, blood flowing from everyone,” one medic recalls. “They started torturing me, they started electrocuting me.”
In a particularly strong segment, the film details how Israeli medics have been complicit in the torture of Palestinian medics.
Some Israeli medics refused to treat Palestinian prisoners and even physically abused them.
One Palestinian doctor, formerly a detainee, tells us how an Israeli medic threatened to kill him.
An anonymous Israeli medic recalls seeing a Palestinian detainee being forced to undergo an operation with no anaesthetic.
“That was a way to inflict pain,” he says. “I am an accomplice, as well as an Israeli physician, to how we have been treating Gazans.”
Unimaginable courage
The film also explores the fate of Dr Adnan al-Bursh, who was the head of orthopaedics at al-Shifa hospital.
A colleague recalls that on the day he was taken by Israeli soldiers, “he looked directly at me as if he was saying goodbye”.
That was the last time he was seen alive.
Hamouda remembers that he saw al-Bursh while he was in detention. “It was clear he had been beaten and tortured”.
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Al-Bursh was killed in Israeli detention in mid-April. His remains have not been returned to his family.
A voiceover tells us that “Dr al-Bursh was supportive of the 7 October attacks… like some of the other medics in this film”. This feels particularly jarring, given al-Bursh’s recent killing.
At other times, the film depicts the unimaginable courage of the healthcare workers who risk everything to save lives in the most deadly circumstances.
Doctors are depicted working with manual ventilation and chargeable lights in darkened rooms. We see an Israeli strike hit a convoy of ambulances exiting al-Shifa.
We are shown surgeons who defied Israeli army evacuation in order to travel to hospitals in the north to help.
Israel has killed at least 1,500 healthcare workers since the start of its war on the besieged enclave.
This film, ultimately, is a powerful and rigorous piece of documentation not just of the horrors of the war on Gaza, but also of the magnificent bravery and monumental sacrifice of these healthcare workers.
And Britain’s public broadcaster decided not to air it.
After the BBC pulled the documentary, its producers, Basement Films, said that “we would like to thank the doctors and contributors and survivors, and to apologise for not believing them when they said the BBC would never run a film like this.
“It turned out they were right.”
