The BBC documentary was rated 5 stars by @guardian before it was pulled... Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone review – these incredible children offer a sliver of hope: This often-distressing BBC documentary follows astonishing kids working as TikTok chefs and hospital porters – and shows their determination to smile in the face of unimaginable horror

All the children in the film share a disorienting matter-of-fact tone’ … Abdullah, who acts as narrator in Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone. Photograph: Amjad Al Fayoumi/BBC/Hoyo Films

 Miqdaad Versi

@miqdaad

The BBC documentary was rated 5 stars by @guardian before it was pulled

Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone review – these incredible children offer a sliver of hope

Jack Seale

Mon 17 Feb 2025 17.00 EST

Last modified on Fri 21 Feb 2025 11.37 EST

The children of Gaza will be its future, if they are able to remain there. Starting several months into Israel’s bombardment and continuing right up until the recent ceasefire, London-based directors Jamie Roberts and Yousef Hammash made their documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone by remotely instructing two local cameramen, Amjad Al Fayoumi and Ibrahim Abu Ishaiba, as they captured life inside the “safe zone” – an ever-changing, ever-dwindling area in the south-west of Gaza, designated by Israel as the place where displaced Palestinians should reside. That the cameras predominantly follow children has an unexpected double effect: it makes the film’s many deeply distressing moments all the more unbearable, yet it tinges them with some sort of hope.

The kids are led by 13-year-old Abdullah, who acts as narrator as well as appearing on camera. “This area used to be colourful,” he says, briskly touring a scene of apocalyptic destruction in Khan Younis, where he lived in a house that sheltered 40 people before Israeli bombs turned it to dusty rubble. “Now, it’s grey.”

Abdullah maintains a wryly sunny tone as he describes how you live after you’ve lost everything, and his determination to smile while surviving is matched by 10-year-old Renad, whose method of coping with shells landing a terrifyingly short distance away is to laugh and chatter, even as the earth shakes. Renad concentrates instead on her online cooking channel: we see her recording a guide to making a dessert, apologising to viewers for having to use powdered milk. She is a natural presenter, fluent and engagingly upbeat. “They’re from all over the world,” Renad says of her growing TikTok fanbase. “If there is too long between posting videos, they check on me, thinking I got killed.”

Most remarkable is Zakaria, an indefatigable 11-year-old who chooses to spend all his time bustling around al-Aqsa, the only fully functioning hospital still standing in Gaza, having appointed himself to work as a volunteer... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/feb/17/gaza-how-to-survive-a-warzone-review-these-incredible-children-offer-a-sliver-of-hope

 [AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or watch videos) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine ]