Three years of horrific bombardment, destruction, wanton murder in Gaza… The lives of its residents, already unbearable, have become a living (or dying) hell.

Inevitably, this vast atrocity carried out by the Israeli regime and its fascist military, with the full complicity and encouragement of Washington, London, Paris and Berlin, has found reflection in visual imagery in particular. As much as these bandits would like to conceal the criminality, great numbers of people have seen it “live-streamed,” fueling mass outrage and opposition. The imperialists are digging their own graves.

The 51-minute documentary Filmed in Gaza is a modest contribution to the world’s knowledge about the Gaza assault. Qualification is necessary because this is a product of NBC News, and NBC on the whole is one of the pillars of the American establishment. Here, however, a portion of the truth emerges.

The film follows the daily lives of and dangers facing NBC producer Samed Abu Zarifa and videographer Samir Al Boji, both Palestinians. Samed and Samir served as NBC News’s sole on-the-ground reporting team inside the Gaza Strip from October 2023 until they were evacuated in 2025. Israel of course severely restricted reporting. One of its means of enforcing the ongoing “restrictions” has been to kill more than 200 journalists.

The footage filmed by Samed and Samir was widely shared across NBC, but their identities were undisclosed for the sake of their safety. Their material did reach an audience of millions.

The Online News Association (ONA), in presenting an award to Filmed in Gaza, described the documentary’s contents:

Samed and Samir document airstrikes and emergency medical responses, filming the deaths of many civilians and colleagues. Some scenes are devastating. The viewer watches as Samed weeps over the dead body of Yousef, a close friend killed by an airstrike. Yousef was killed inside a tent Samed had left just minutes earlier. We also see Samir as he films an ambulance ride with a father cradling the dead body of his 10-year-old daughter. The journalists share how the experience continues to haunt them and changed them as people.

Of course, such a catastrophic experience and coming face to face with this level of brutality and inhumanity “changes” people. In the faces and bodies of the two men, increasingly ghostly and saddened, we can read something about the event. Samed and Samir are husbands and fathers, and their families were able to leave Gaza by the summer of 2024, while they remained behind for another year. The film includes personal footage from before Oct. 7, moments of separation at the Egyptian border and scenes of how they communicated while they were separated.

Palestine International Broadcast notes that

“Several Palestinian journalists and photographers from Gaza participated in the project, including photojournalist Samir Al-Buji and journalist Samed Wajih Abu Zreifa. Activists and media figures widely praised the film on social media, viewing it as documentation of the suffering of Palestinian journalists and their role in conveying the truth to the world.”

There are genuinely moving moments in the film, including the efforts of Lawahez Jabari, an NBC News bureau producer based in Tel Aviv, to extricate the two men from Gaza, as their own physical conditions deteriorate and they are threatened with starvation. The scene of their successful departure is affecting, but one can only think of the masses of Gazans left behind.

The merits are real, but so are the false or misleading elements, including a stark lack of historical explanation.

Filmed in Gaza begins with these titles:

“On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched the worst terror attack in Israel’s history. More than 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.

“Israel declared war. Its stated goal was recovering all hostages and destroying Hamas, including its network of underground tunnels.”

This brief comment is what laughingly constitutes “context” in the US, British or Israeli media. Every homicidal act committed by the IDF is justified or explained away as a reaction, or possibly even an over-reaction, to the “terror attack” of October 7. This is nonsense, a “context” that is not genuine context at all.

If one were really serious about context, one would start with the driving out of 750,00 to one million Palestinians in 1948, involving the killing of tens of thousands, the razing of entire villages, the destruction of orchards, the wholesale theft of land, the jailing and torture of thousands, the transformation of Gaza into an open air prison, the endless series of crimes and humiliations inflicted on the Palestinians. Unsurprisingly, NBC News does not consider this worth mentioning.

Also, it is necessary to heap scorn on the constantly repeated claim that this was a “deadly surprise” attack. Frankly, we don’t even need the numerous and convincing revelations that have appeared in the media about Netanyahu having “received repeated, detailed warnings about the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks,” to figure this out.

When it serves the Zionists’ purpose, they boast about their technological supremacy, their sophisticate use of AI in developing the means to murder people on a vast scale.

For example, the Los Angeles Times reported on Israel’s targeting system against Hezbollah:

The system, which fuses data from smartphones, security and traffic cameras, Wi-Fi signals, drones, government databases and social media, has granted Israel what seems an almost omniscient ability to track Hezbollah cadres’ every movement.

The Israeli military-intelligence apparatus gloats about every “kill” it perpetrates through such means. But we are to believe this same apparatus was unaware that over 1,500 Hamas fighters were prepared to cross the border, members or supporters of a movement that Israel has spied on and infiltrated for decades. No one but a child or a fool would believe that.

Filmed in Gaza is useful, within definite limits.