Mission Review – A surgeon saves lives in war-torn Gaza in a profound portrait of human resilience | film

WThis documentary may lack in craftsmanship, but it makes up for it with deep, emotional impact. British neurosurgeon Mohammed Taher and his colleagues, who also work on the cameras, toil in barely functioning Gaza hospitals during some of the worst days and nights of the war in the winter of 2024-2025. With support from the US-based charity Fajr International, which provides medical care to the world’s most needy people, Taher works through bombing and power outages using minimal medical supplies, sometimes treating patients lying on the floor in pools of blood because there are no stretchers. This is often difficult to watch, and not just because of all the gore; Many of the victims are children, from whom Taher and the others extracted bullets as well as small tungsten cubes, new fragments designed to cause maximum damage.

With his good looks, unwavering composure and impeccable spirit of efficiency, Tahir is an excellent guide to all this chaos. For the most part, he patiently obliges, but his coldness dissolves when he discusses, for example, how he had to remove a random jawbone embedded in a sick wound. Later, he treats a young girl who lost her arm in a bombing; He was able to reconnect it after the family found the severed limb in the rubble of their home. The film could easily have felt like an endless procession of tragedy and bloodshed, but the filmmakers wisely offer a few moments of respite, such as a scene in which Tahir and his fellow medics enjoy their day at the beach. Likewise, a scene in which he teases a female medical student hunched over her textbooks briefly relieves the burden of melancholy.

The final section, filmed just after the ceasefire was declared, shows footage of a miles-long procession of refugees walking home, a picture of human endurance that is impossible to shake. There is almost no discussion of politics here, at least no explicit mention of the cause of this disaster, but the images speak eloquently in their own right, poignant in a way that regular news reports cannot match.