Reports in a territory marked beyond all imagination.

M6 – SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 8 AT 11:10 PM – REPORT

Hell is often not paved with good intentions, but rather with bombs. The report that “Exclusive Investigation” dedicates to Gaza, where the war led by Israel has been going on for eleven months, shows a territory marked beyond all imagination.

From the first minutes, the fateful sequence of events is recalled. The deadly attack carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023 targeted military posts surrounding Palestinian territory, Israeli kibbutzis and a techno music festival taking place nearby. The massacres committed by the Islamist organization and the armed gangs that entered Israel after it caused 1,195 Israeli deaths, including soldiers but above all a large majority of civilians, including women, children and the elderly. In addition, 251 hostages were forcibly taken to Palestinian territory.

The Israeli response was proportional to this unprecedented attack in terms of violence and scale: the “Flood of Al-Aqsa” was followed by the “Iron Sword”. These events are known to all. What is even rarer is sharing almost an hour of the daily life of the inhabitants of Gaza, driven from their homes by the incessant bombardments and ground offensives.

Information blocking

For the first time since the start of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel has strictly banned any foreign journalist from entering a war zone. The Gaza Strip is completely cut off from the world. To get around this information blackout, Martine Laroche-Joubert decided to work with Shrouq Aila, a local Palestinian journalist, also a young mother of a child and widow of a journalist who was killed on 22 October 2023 in an attack. A hundred Palestinian journalists have been attacked since the start of the war: an unprecedented massacre.

Shrouq Aila covers part of the 360 ​​square kilometres of the Gaza Strip, mainly in the south. He goes to meet the residents, most of them displaced people who have left the north of the enclave. At the time of the filming, 1 million displaced people – out of a population of almost 2.5 million – were crowded in Rafah, the southernmost city of the Gaza Strip, very close to Egypt, which they could see from their makeshift tents. But the offensive announced by Israel in early May in the Rafah area is driving them back towards Deir Al-Balah.

The scale of the destruction – 70% of homes rendered uninhabitable, more than 80% of health facilities damaged or destroyed, water and electricity cut off, 39 million tons of rubble and debris – is beyond comprehension. Hospitals, which operate in more than precarious conditions, are overrun by displaced families sleeping in the corridors. However, the human losses are the most terrible: 39,000 dead – including 14,000 children – at the time the documentary was made, almost 41,000 today, more than 80,000 wounded, including 12,000 children. Epidemics and hunger are already here.

Survive until the next day.

This procession of horrors is too often reduced to nothing more than a litany of figures and formulas about “collateral damage” or the “Shooting errors”. We must see and hear the inhabitants of Gaza, their anguish but also their humour and their calm in the face of the catastrophe. The main interest of this documentary is to show Gaza and its inhabitants up close. Despite the death and destruction, the maternity wards are always full. The womb of women is the last weapon of the inhabitants of Gaza, their last refuge: to replace their murdered children with new ones, as if they were refusing to accept their disappearance.

Few political comments are included in the stories, the main thing is to survive until the next day without thinking about later. But in some testimonies, and in the tone of the report, there is a fearful criticism of Hamas, which decided the fate of the inhabitants of Gaza without assuming the consequences. Hidden in the immense labyrinth of tunnels built underground, the leader of the Islamist organisation, Yahya Sinouar, remains at large.

As laborious negotiations over a ceasefire and an exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners stall, Gazans know well that the end of the fighting will not mark the end of the war. Water and electricity will not return soon. Reconstruction will take at least a generation. As for peace…