Phone calls from the Gaza apocalypse
Photo: ‘Life Support’ directed by Daniele Rugo
Daniel Nelson
Life Support is a doctors’-eye-view of the Israeli attack on Gaza.
And what a visceral, appalling view it is.
Most of us will have long ago made up our minds on the rights and wrongs of the onslaught, but it’s hard to believe that this footage will not persuade the still uncommitted that what has occurred is deliberate destruction of life.
The bulk of the film was shot by three doctors working in Gazan hospitals. They used their phones to gather evidence of their work and to record video diaries where they talk about their working conditions, the targeting of medical facilities and the endless nightmare stream of damaged patients.
The three witnesses are Tanya Haj Hassan, a paediatric intensive care doctor in the UK with years of experience on MSF humanitarian missions and one of few international witnesses to visit the north of the strip; Victoria Rose, a London-based plastic surgeon who has been on four Gaza missions since October 2023; and Nick Maynard, a top gastrointestinal UK surgeon, who has helped set up cancer services in Gaza and has been on three missions.
Their raw, desperate, desolate, damning footage is supplemented by shots of the impossible living conditions in Gaza provided by two Gazan cameramen, Mahmoud Abou Hamda and Suleiman Hejjy.
The result is a blistering, unflinching, shocking, first-hand account of wartime hospital mayhem.
It’s a tragic documentary. Not an easy watch, but as director Daniele Rugo has said: “Their shock is our shock. Their moral injury — the price of bearing witness — is one we must all share. Their presence in Gaza is an act of radical solidarity that questions our absence.”
My words cannot add much to what we see on screen, except to say that it’s a moving, important film and needs to be seen by as many people as possible.
Life Support screenings: 9 July, Curzon Mayfair; 10 July, Curzon Bloomsbury (+ Q&A) and Garden cinema until 16 July; Odeons Acton, Greenwich, Holloway, Kingston, 14 July; Act One, 17 July
Statement by director Daniele Rugo: Life Support begins with a simple premise: highly trained surgeons, physicians and nurses from around the world volunteer in a war zone. There to share expertise, and to support Palestinian doctors, they find themselves bearing witness to a genocide as the sole international observers. The doctors in this story hold up a mirror. Their shock is our shock. Their moral injury—the price of bearing witness—is one we must all share. Their presence in Gaza is an act of radical solidarity that questions our absence. This film does not offer easy answers. It documents, with unflinching clarity, what happens when healing becomes resistance, and when the world’s silence grows louder than bombs.