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.
For the first third, the focus is on the testimonies of Israelis who saw loved ones killed or abducted on 7 October. It is an indelibly traumatic viewing experience, with one scene in particular, taken from footage released by Hamas itself, that is impossible to forget. In Nahal Oz – a kibbutz 700 metres from the border fence – a family home has been invaded; the elder daughter has been shot dead. Now her parents and siblings sit huddled, petrified, on the floor. The young son’s wails are difficult enough to take, but the sight of the bereaved father, smeared with his daughter’s blood, bowing his head in hopeless despair, is disturbing in the extreme, even before we learn that he was taken hostage on that day and has not been seen since. Recollections of a similar experience at the Nir Oz kibbutz, and of the massacre at the Nova music festival, complete a horrific picture of a day in which about 800 Israeli civilians were killed and 250 or so were taken hostage.
These personal tragedies are powerfully presented, but Into the Abyss runs into difficulty when it tries to add historical context. The 7 October attack apparently arrives from nowhere: explanatory captions portray Israel as a former occupier that, since its withdrawal of ground troops from Gaza in 2005, has merely enforced a “partial blockade”, but has regularly been obliged to engage in wars started by Hamas.
Viewers happening upon Into the Abyss with limited prior knowledge of the situation aren’t told, for instance, how often Palestinians were being killed by Israel before 7 October, or how many were being detained without legal process in Israeli detention centres. They are, however, shown scenes of celebration in Gaza on 7 October; and when Israeli bombs begin to fall on Gaza, the film includes footage of a stretcher-bearer shouting “Allahu Akbar!” as he carries a victim to hospital, moments after Hamas terrorists have been seen saying the same before massacring civilians.
Difficult choices are everywhere in a programme like this but, even as it gives voice to the Gazan people and shows a good deal of the suffering imposed on them, the omissions in Into the Abyss tend to favour Israel. That Israel has “tightly restricted” supplies moving into Gaza isn’t an adequate description of how food, power and water have been used as weapons of war, although we do hear about Gazans becoming so hungry they fight over bags of flour. We are shown whole residential areas reduced to rubble, without quite seeing the extent of the destruction across Gaza. Appalling scenes of carnage are included – one heartbreaking moment shows a young woman at the location of a missile attack, saying: “I’m trying to find any part of my father for us to bury” – but there is nothing to match the hundreds of clips that people following the conflict online have seen every day.
Into the Abyss does, however, go further than almost any other western media portrayal of the devastation. Particularly harrowing are the footage and interviews covering the attack on the Indonesia hospital in November: the shot of a destroyed ward, with a child lying dead on the bed where they had been receiving treatment, is stark, and when it turns out that a doctor relaying his experiences of dealing with impossible casualty numbers was subsequently arrested and detained in a facility where he says Gazans were routinely abused, we have some idea of the layered injustices people there have suffered.
Does it amount to genocide? Viewers are given just enough material to arrive at their own conclusions. But at every turn, so much more could be said.
• Israel and Gaza: Into the Abyss aired on ITV1 and is on ITVX now.
