Making a documentary about Gaza for British television must be a daunting task. It was ever thus – any contentious assertion will be met with unusually fierce criticism – but now film-makers have to contend not only with the sheer size of the current crisis, but the fact that it has already played out in real time via social media, in a way that previous flashpoints have not. It may well be that a fully honest portrayal of what has happened in Gaza in the past year would be deemed unbroadcastable, but if you fall short, informed viewers will know.
Into the Abyss, a new feature-length documentary by Robin Barnwell, suffers from the same fundamental problem as the BBC’s The Darkest Days, shown in April. It does a fine job of conveying the scale of the horror and terror inflicted on Israel on 7 October 2023, when fighters from Hamas, the organisation that governs the Palestinian territory of Gaza, invaded. But it doesn’t manage the same for the 11 months of attacks on Gaza by the Israeli military that have followed.
