Police Shut Down Screening of Gaza Films at Yabous Cultural Centre

Just minutes before the first film in the series Gaza’s Untold Stories from Ground Zero was scheduled to begin at Yabous Cultural Centre on August 7, 2024, a large white car stopped in front of the entry on al-Zahra Street in East Jerusalem. Several men got out of the car and identified themselves as Israeli intelligence officers.

They entered the Yabous Cultural Centre with a show of force, as though they were on a Hollywood set, followed by a large force of Israeli special forces, and announced to the waiting crowd that the evening’s screening scheduled to begin momentarily was canceled.

The screening was scheduled to mark the 10-month anniversary of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, which was launched on October 7, 2023.

Gaza’s Untold Stories from Ground Zero is a project spearheaded by one of the foremost Palestinian filmmakers, Rashid Masharawi, who was born in Gaza to a family of Palestinian refugees originally from Jaffa. The project oversaw the development of 22 short (3- to 6-minute long) films shot on the ground during the ongoing genocidal war. Rashid devised the project as a way to give Palestinians in Gaza an opportunity to tell their stories—about the way they are living, the tragedies they are experiencing, and what they are doing to survive. As he explained in an interview with +972 Magazine, “The films are very diverse. We let the directors make their films themselves, and some of them narrate their own experience because they are in the events. They are the event itself.”1

Making the films in the midst of such a brutal, all-encompassing war required some extraordinary feats of production as well as personal sacrifice by the filmmakers. “Some of the filmmakers were losing relatives during filming or preparation and during the writing stage, which kept them away from the project,” Rashid has said. “And some were exposed to real danger in accessing a place with the internet to send the materials they filmed.”2 Filmmakers even shared that they would send footage as it was captured, to ensure their scenes would survive if they did not.

As well, not all the films that were intended for inclusion were able to be completed. “Sadly, we had several projects that did not make it,” Rashid explained in an interview with The National. “Some stories couldn’t make it because the filmmaker’s footage, his computer and everything he had was bombarded. For instance, there was a film about a woman who goes to the hospital as she is about to give birth. But there is no space in the hospital for her. The hospital is filled with death and there is no place for new life.”3

Jerusalem District Acting Commander Amir Arzani signed the order prohibiting the screening at Yabous (and anywhere else) on the grounds that it constituted “incitement against Israel.”4 Officers from the Jerusalem District presented the order to the organizers before the screening began. It read:

Police ordered the audience to leave and commenced a search of the center. They did not, however, close the center down.

Itamar Ben-Gvir later told Israeli media: “I commend Assistant Commissioner Amir Arzani for preventing the screening of the Hamas propaganda film. The policy that I outlined for the police is clear—zero tolerance for terror propaganda, support for Hamas, and incitement.”6

None of the young men and women who had come to view the films tried to object, knowing that that would lead to their arrest, as one waiting bystander, Nevin, 24, told Jerusalem Story.

Since the war on Gaza began on October 7, she said, the Israeli police and intelligence services “have become more violent and cruel and do not hesitate to arrest, beat, and insult anyone who objects to their steps that fall within the gagging principle.”7

Saeed Musa, who regularly attends cultural activities in Jerusalem, said that since the war on Gaza, Israeli pressure has prevented any cultural activities from being held, no matter how small. “They are suffocating us.”8

An attendee who asked not to be identified told Jerusalem Story: “Even the word ‘Gaza’ has become forbidden in Jerusalem. Anyone who utters it or tries to carry out any activity under the name Gaza is prevented from doing so and arrested.”9

The next day, on August 8, the same films were screened by Shoruq Organization in Dheisheh refugee camp in the nearby Palestinian city of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank without incident.