It has been more than a year of war and violence since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks — the deadliest day for Jews since World War II — and Israel’s retaliation against Hamas, which has reportedly killed tens of thousands in Gaza and displaced hundreds of thousands more.

FRONTLINE’s A Year of War: Israelis and Palestinians, directed by Robin Barnwell and produced by Barnwell and Toby Fitzpatrick, documents harrowing stories from those who experienced the Oct. 7 attacks and the ongoing war in Gaza first-hand.

Barnwell talked to FRONTLINE about why he wanted to tell the story of the conflict through individual Israelis and Palestinians, and “give a compassionate insight into both sides’ agonies.” He spoke about the challenges the local production team faced, finding participants and filming while struggling to survive in Gaza. He also talked about his own memories of reporting from southern Israel.

The Q&A was conducted in writing and edited.

How did you get the idea for this film? And how long did it take to come together?

The terror attack on Israel on Oct. 7 was horrifying. I was in Ukraine, covering the war there when it happened. I stayed there to finish a documentary I was filming but knew then that I wanted to tell the stories of the Oct. 7 victims, to document the savagery of the event and to give a voice to those affected. The last year has been the most violent of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and it felt right to feature victims of the war on both sides and to reflect a range of views. The film took around seven months to make — interviewing people and gathering footage in Israel and Gaza.

I did not want to focus on one side or the other, as I don’t think that will tell you as much about the current state of the conflict.

For most Israelis, Oct. 7 was a defining moment in their nation’s history, triggering historic trauma of the Holocaust. It will shape their outlook for decades to come. Likewise, the war in Gaza, in which tens of thousands of civilians have died, and most of the strip’s 2.3 million people displaced, has triggered the historic trauma of what Palestinians call the Nakba when 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes and land, as the state of Israel was created and during the Arab-Israeli war.

The views of people on both sides seem to have grown much further apart from each other. I wanted the documentary to reflect this while also acknowledging that some people in Gaza and Israel still want to find a solution to end the never-ending cycle of violence, for the sake of their children and future generations. The views of people trying to find solutions are not popular in the current highly-charged atmosphere, but I think they should be heard.

Why did you choose to tell the story of the first year of this war through individual people?

The idea was to give viewers around the world an understanding as to how the Oct. 7 attacks and the ensuing war in Gaza impacted the views of Israelis and Palestinians about each other. I also wanted to bring out the humanity of the victims on both sides, to have relatable, sympathetic individuals who people would listen to, whatever their perspective on history and events. I wanted to give a compassionate insight into both sides’ agonies and to show the tragedy of a cycle of violence that doesn’t appear to have an end.

Can you take me through the process of gathering these interviews? How did you find each person and how did you decide that these would be the stories featured in the film?

When we were commissioned to make the documentary, I thought I’d be able to travel to Gaza to film there myself. But more than one year into the war, there is still no free and unfettered access inside Gaza for foreign media.

Given the extreme dangers of filming in Gaza and the high number of deaths of local journalists, we decided to look for Gazan contributors who had already been recording their lives during the war instead of commissioning people. The first challenge was to find potential contributors and camera people who had already filmed footage that was mostly unseen. Gaza currently has weak internet, so we had to conduct searches online from the U.K. to identify potential candidates, so that our local producers could then meet them in person. We, of course, spent a lot of time vetting the footage and making sure the contributors were telling the truth and had no hidden agendas.

We selected a group of participants whose wide range of experiences accurately reflect the intensity and horror of the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the hostage crisis, and the ongoing war in Gaza. These Israeli and Palestinian victims have collectively suffered terror, loss, detention, displacement and mental anguish; some have changed their views about the other side, developing new perspectives on the conflict.

Some of the people in the documentary were in Gaza. How did you manage to get their stories? What were some of the challenges?

Our team had to be careful traveling around Gaza and tried to identify the high-risk areas to avoid but nowhere is totally safe.

One of the greatest challenges was getting the footage out of a besieged Gaza, which has taken months and months of painstaking work. Many journalists who had to leave their homes have taken up residence in tents in hospital courtyards, which allows them to share electricity from hospital generators. They’ve set up improvised internet access ports, but for the amount of footage we needed to get out of Gaza, this internet was far too slow and intermittent loss of connection would cause transfers to fail. Eventually, our team found a technician repairing internet lines in central Gaza. This man had somehow turned his home into an internet hub, with the fastest connection the team could find in Gaza. Finally, over the course of a week, we were able to transfer the footage that our team had collected for months.

An even bigger challenge was telling the story of northern Gaza. Gaza has been effectively split in two, as the Israeli military has gained complete control of a ‘corridor’ that spans the entire width of the strip. At times, this corridor has served as an Israeli Defense Forces checkpoint through which civilians and aid agencies can travel. However, for the most part, the crossing point has remained closed or is considered too risky for local journalists. This meant putting together a team based in northern Gaza — the worst affected area of the strip. All aspects of life in northern Gaza are exceptionally difficult. As of June 2024, the United Nations said 65% of northern Gaza’s remaining population was still facing ‘high’ or ‘catastrophic’ levels of acute food insecurity, which means their inability to access enough food put their lives in danger. Finding food and clean water was a daily consideration for our team.

Each day, the members of our Palestinian production team have been struggling to survive in Gaza. One team member has been living in a tent for over a year, after losing nearly everything. Others have fled their homes. They have been terrified, narrowly escaped death and endured heartbreaking separations from loved ones. A member of our northern Gaza team had to navigate the difficulties of his wife giving birth to a child. One afternoon, our fixer was at a local phone charging station with his 8-year-old son. Just moments after they left the area, an airstrike hit, reportedly killing two people and wounding two more. This was the third near-death experience for our fixer’s family since Oct. 7. Thankfully, his wife and children were able to safely leave Gaza before its southern border with Egypt was completely sealed by the Israeli military. He hopes to reunite with them as soon as possible.

Through all this, our team has shown immense professionalism and objectivity together with extraordinary good humor and humanity in extreme adversity.

Similarly, were there security issues or challenges in interviewing Israelis who lived in the communities along the border with Gaza? What was your access to that area like?

I wanted to visit the communities that had been attacked to see for myself the impact of Oct. 7, even though the people we filmed no longer lived there. I will always remember being given a tour of Nir Oz on a golf cart by a wonderful resident in his eighties who had survived the attack.

Shortly after this visit, I met Bat-Sheva Yahalomi and she kindly agreed to an interview. She proposed filming it in the ruins of her home, which had become a battleground on Oct. 7. The blood of her husband, who had been taken hostage, was on the wall, her living room pockmarked with bullet holes and shrapnel. Despite Bat-Sheva living a couple of kilometers from Gaza, the attackers on Oct. 7 were the first Palestinians from Gaza she had met in her life. They took her injured husband and 12-year-old son hostage.

During our interview, as she was retelling the horrors of that day, we heard large booms and vibrations, as Israel fired artillery rounds into Gaza, a reminder of the ongoing war that was ignited by the Oct. 7 attacks. My team and I had to stay alert to the threat of rockets that have regularly been fired into the area we were filming, targeting the kibbutzim that were attacked on Oct. 7, most of which remain depopulated.

What do you hope viewers take away from this documentary?

I hope that viewers will empathize with the people in the film, whatever their own pre-existing views. I hope that those watching will think about the collective suffering and trauma. The film deliberately has no narration. The people in it are ordinary victims who have been deeply emotionally impacted by events. I want people to listen to their words and perspectives and, in doing so, gain a better understanding of the tragedy, of the perpetual conflict and those caught up in it. As one of our Israeli contributors says, “We are both here to stay.”

 

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