“Bombings usually occur when everything is quiet.”
Ten-year-old Amani remembers many details of the two wars she has already experienced in her young years, both of which took place during Ramadan, in the 2014 and 2021 Israeli bombing campaigns.
“Airstrikes intensified during mealtimes,” she recalls. “They [the Israelis] know we are fasting.”
Amani from Gaza City, is one of the protagonists of Vibrations from Gaza, an eye-opening film on the reality of how deaf children feel, perceive, and live through wars.
Directed by the Palestinian Canadian multidisciplinary artist Rehab Nazzal, the documentary was published a couple of months before 7 October 2023, after which the history of the Strip entered another horrific, genocidal phase.
Receiving 11 awards already – among them the Short Film Award at the 2024 BFI London Film Festival – the movie was recently screened in Amman, at the Darat Al Funun museum.
There, The New Arab met Rehab to discuss further the reasons for making such a movie and how this sits in her long-standing career as an artist and activist.
‘I couldn’t stay still’
“It is indeed my activism that brought me to Gaza almost four years ago,” shared Rehab, when asked why she decided to work on such a project.
Recounting the circumstances of the summer of 2021 – when, in May, Israel waged a brutal 11-day war following an escalation of violence that began with the eviction of six Palestinian families in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah – Rehab said, “At that time, in Canada, I was devastated following the news. I couldn’t stay still.”
“I needed to do something, so I contacted some friends in Gaza to get there, and I got a letter of invitation from the Ministry of Health to work on art therapy for children with special conditions,” she added.
Arriving a week after the airstrikes ended, Rehab shared that she felt “so torn apart” and mentioned that these children require special materials and medications that Israel does not allow into Gaza, nor does it grant permission for treatments in the West Bank.
As a result, in some cases, children just die because of the impossibility of being treated – a reality well established even before 7 October.
“This situation affected me even further when I concluded my work at the Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children, where the trauma of war was even more visible,” Rehab noted.
There, the artist met for the first time Amani and the children appearing in the movie.
Among them were the siblings Mustafa and Musa, “who would not stop crying, and at first, I could not speak a word with them,” remembers Rehab.
In saying this, Rehab emphasised that the decision to make a movie came later after she returned to Canada and could not shake the disturbing sound of drones that she had heard everywhere in Gaza.
“It was like torture for me. I could not sleep or rest because of that horrible buzz,” Rehab shared.
Through their eyes
After putting together her ideas, the following year, Rehab travelled back to Gaza to shoot the film, spending all her time with Atfaluna, which has been working with children with hearing disabilities and education since 1992.
Rehab developed close relations with Amani, Mustafa, Musa, and others, whom she had met the year before.
“Knowing each other already, we managed to build trust gradually and a pathway together,” said the artist, commenting on the difficulty of communicating with children of different capabilities about tough topics like war.
As the children speak with sign language, the only sounds present throughout the whole movie are the drone buzz and, at times, the roar of sea waves, which manage only partially to soften the noise of the former.
The intensive mix of the sound and the information provided by the children leaves the public with discomfort, as the disturbing drone noise attempts to replicate how the children feel.
In the movie, they explain how the horrors of the bombings are perceived through the trembling earth, vibrations in the air, and the collapsing buildings around them.
“I feel warplanes through vibrations in the air,” says Musa in the movie, while Isra, 15, explains in more detail her experience: “When airstrikes hit the ground or a building, the earth shakes beneath me. The noise penetrates my ears, my body shudders with the concussion of the blast.”
Deafness as a blessing
With over four terabytes of material collected, Rehab chose to have a sixteen-minute final product.
“The urgency to publish led me to decide to make a short,” she admitted, adding, “After seventeen years of siege and wars, a life like a concentration camp, Gaza had been forgotten in the media and global politics.”
Feeling outraged, Rehab wanted to urgently use her experience to shed light on at least two things.
“First, how Israel is using Gaza as a lab for testing weapons – specifically sonic weapons, which most likely,” as she confesses, not having scientific evidence yet, “cause the hearing impairment among the population, especially children.”
On the other hand, Rehab’s objective was to shed light on the Israeli 17-year siege on Gaza, preventing basic materials for human life from entering.
“I am not even sure that ‘barbaric’ is an appropriate term to describe the situation in Gaza and Palestine over the past 15 months. We are searching for new terms because we don’t have any that truly describe the horrors we are witnessing, honestly,” she added.
Echoing Rehab, Maryam Mahmoud, head of the school at Atfaluna, intervening remotely after the screening, further unpacked the challenges faced by Gaza’s deaf community and the broader implications of life under siege and atrocities.
“During the first months of the Israeli bombings after 7 October, we were not even able to get the small batteries for the hearing aids, which are essential for deaf children!” Maryam explained.
After years of art and activism focusing on the effects of settler-colonial violence on the bodies and minds of colonised peoples, Rehab was impressed by how children in Gaza are aware of their situation.
“There are two sentences that I can’t get out of my mind. It was when Amani said, ‘It’s a blessing to be deaf, so I am the least to be terrorised when there are bombings,’ and when she answered my question on why she thinks the Israelis are doing all this, with ‘because they want to get rid of us and take our land,’” Rehab highlighted.
Communicating the story of Palestinians
Vibrations from Gaza adds another layer to Rehab’s long-standing artistic and activist work.
“I chose this line of work because I felt the need to communicate my story and the story of Palestinians,” Rehab said.
Born in Jenin, Rehab was exiled for 25 years and was unable to return to Palestine until 2005.
This experience fuelled her passion for media art, and since then, she has used her work to draw attention to the oppression of Palestinians and their struggle for freedom, dignity, and rights.
Rehab’s exhibitions and documentaries, such as Canada Park, about the East Jerusalem park built out of the destruction by Israel of three Palestinian villages and the displacement of 10,000 people, are among her most important exhibitions.
Other projects include Walking under Occupation, Driving in Palestine, and Invisible, the latter of which received significant attention but also intense backlash, particularly in Canada and the US.
Despite facing personal attacks, including death threats, Rehab remains dedicated to her cause, responding through critical art that challenges global injustices.
Hope and resilience remain central to her work, especially in the face of continued violence, and despite the bleak situation in Gaza, Rehab draws inspiration from Jenin, where she believes resistance and hope continue to thrive.
“If there is one place that shows what hope, resistance, and resilience is,” Rehab said, “then you have to go to Jenin refugee camp.”
Stefano Nanni is an Italian freelance journalist with a background in the aid sector
