CAIRO: As real explosions shook the Gaza Strip, a fictionalized version was being beamed into Egyptian homes in prime time — drawing more criticism than praise from those still under the bombs.
Buildings reduced to rubble, hospitals-turned-battlefields and the incessant buzz of quadcopters: the creators of TV series “Sohab Al-Ard,” or “Owners of the Land,” set out to recreate the war in the Palestinian territory with elaborate set design.
But for those living in the real-life ruins, the line between entertainment and fiction was horrifically blurred.
“Watching an actor cry over a plastic dummy, soon after I’ve had to bury my sister with my bare hands, it’s more than I can bear,” said 21-year-old Yasser Al-Najjar, originally from northern Gaza but now living in a tent in the southern city of Rafah.
Since the start of the war in October 2023, more than 71,000 people have been killed in the territory.
The show follows an Egyptian doctor, played by Menna Shalabi, and a Palestinian father separated from his children, Eyad Nassar, as they encounter horrors including hospitals being bombed.
Bisan Saife, a 30-year-old mother who has been displaced 10 times, told AFP: “When you’ve lived through something that terrifying, you don’t want to watch it on TV.”
The 15-episode drama — aired with English subtitles — is “not for us Palestinians,” said Hatem Abu Armana, a member of the Palestinian national committee for amputee football who watched most of the episodes with his family.
“The sound of explosions and the smell of war are already etched in our chests. But the world needs to see what happened to us and what we’ve gone through,” he told AFP.
Reported extensively by both local journalists and regular Palestinians on social media, the war in Gaza has been described as a uniquely “live-streamed” conflict.
“But we wanted to show what was behind the headlines, the human element the news can’t portray,” Jordanian star Nassar said in an interview with the US TV show Entertainment Tonight.
- ‘Before the blood has even dried’ -
The series was produced by United Media Services — a media conglomerate linked to Egyptian intelligence — and directed by Peter Mimi, who previously helmed the three-season drama “El-Ikhtiyar,” or “The Choice,” dramatising Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s 2013 ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood.
True to form, his most recent work was accused of adopting Egypt’s political agenda, obfuscating what some see as Cairo’s complicity in Israel’s siege on Gaza.
On the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, the Palestinian side of which Israel seized and forced shut last May, the series shows Israel denying the entry of life-saving medical supplies.
Ella Waweya, the Israeli army’s Arabic-language spokesperson, immediately lashed out at the production, which she described as “brainwashing” and “a falsification of the facts.”
In one scene, an Egyptian truck driver blocked from delivering aid honks a coded obscenity at Israelis — a scene received on social media as a symbol of the impotent state of Arab solidarity.
The series, released during the high-viewership month of Ramadan, airs on TV and streams on online platforms at a time of widespread Arab frustration that a long history of championing the Palestinian cause did little to stop the killing.
For some, the entire endeavour is grotesque.
One X user accused it of “turning an ongoing genocide into entertainment before the blood has even dried.”
Despite a ceasefire coming into force in October, Israeli fire has killed at least 677 Palestinians since then, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
