Premieres Tuesday, Oct.15, 2024 at 10 p.m. on KPBS TV / PBS app
A year after the October 7 attacks and the start of the war in Gaza, a new FRONTLINE documentary tells the harrowing first-person stories of Israelis and Palestinians living through this unprecedented year of violence.
From award-winning director Robin Barnwell, “A Year of War: Israelis and Palestinians” will premiere Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024. Offering visceral accounts of the October 7 attacks and the year of bloodshed that has followed, the 90-minute documentary follows people in Gaza and Israel as they grapple with death, despair and ongoing trauma.
In the film, Israelis describe what it was like to experience the deadliest day for Jews since World War II as the October 7 attacks unfolded, with around 1,200 people killed, 5,000 injured and 251 taken hostage. And in Gaza, where more than 40,000 people have reportedly been killed in Israel’s retaliation against Hamas, Palestinians describe – and record – the horrors of large-scale devastation.
In kibbutzim targeted by Hamas, two Israeli mothers, Gali and Bat-Sheva, describe what Gali calls the “absolute terror” of family members being shot – including Gali’s young daughter, who died – and partners being taken hostage. Agam, then 17, recalls gunman killing her father and sister, and then “dying from fear” as Hamas held her captive. And Shoham, a young man who was attending the Nova music festival targeted by Hamas, describes running for his life – and coming to terms with death: “I’ve finished the chapter and now the screen is about to turn off, like in the movies.”
In Gaza, Ibrahim, a former commercial photographer, turns his camera on the war even as his own family members, including a two-year-old girl, are killed, saying, “I’ve never seen anything like this, even in movies. Will we wake up the next day, will we have died?”
Ghada, a young Palestinian woman, says she once dreamed of starting a solar energy company, but now, her dream is for her and her family “to make it out alive.” And Dr. Mohammad El-Ran, who worked at Gaza’s Indonesian Hospital as it was repeatedly struck by Israeli fire during the campaign against Hamas, recalls learning on the job that 16 members of his family had been killed, and adjusting to a new and devastating reality: “People who are able to find their loved ones to bury them are the lucky ones.”
Through these individual stories, the film offers a devastating portrait of the conflict as a whole, and a profound look inside a cycle of violence and tragedy with no end in sight.
“I thought in another universe we might live together,” Agam says. “The opportunity is gone.”
“I could die at any moment and so could my family,” says Ghada. “There's no future at all.”
Watch On Your Schedule: “A Year of War: Israelis and Palestinians” will be available to stream in full at pbs.org/frontline and in the PBS app starting Oct. 15, 2024, and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel that night at 10/9c.
Credits: A Top Hat production for GBH/FRONTLINE. The director is Robin Barnwell. The producers are Robin Barnwell and Toby Fitzpatrick. The senior producer is Dan Edge. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.
