Citizens of the world have not needed regular broadcast media to show them the horror of Israel’s seven-month assault on Gaza. Social media has delivered a stream of clips, almost in real time, each video seemingly more shocking than the last. As if to provide a macabre illustration of the point that traditional television has not kept up, the broadcast on Channel 4 of the Dispatches documentary Kill Zone: Inside Gaza arrived the day after smartphones lit up with footage of an attack on a refugee camp in Rafah, and a picture that might define this shameful episode in human history: against a background of tents on fire, a man holds up the body of an infant, perhaps one or two years old, perhaps younger. It is hard to tell the child’s exact age, since they have no head.
Kill Zone is inevitably a harrowing, heartbreaking programme, made with skill and care by 12 Palestinian film-makers who must have been in grave peril throughout, filming over 200 days in the period following Hamas’s heinous attack on Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023. But what is its role, when pictures that would be deemed unbroadcastable on television are already imprinted on our brains, jabbing at our consciences, flaring in our nightmares?
