Hebron Exposed

In a two-part investigation BBC Arabic goes deep inside the divided city of Hebron in the West Bank, the only place where Palestinian residents live alongside Jewish settlers. This second film follows a unique project in which Palestinian teenagers are taught how to use video cameras to capture suspected abuses of human rights in the streets around them.
　　
　　The holy city of Hebron is the most divided in the West Bank, the only place where Palestinian residents live among Jewish settlers. It’s a scene of raw tensions and countless killings. In March 2016 human rights activist Emad Abushamsiya filmed the shooting of a wounded Palestinian by the Israeli soldier Elor Azaria. The video went viral, landing Azaria with a manslaughter conviction and turning Abushamsiya into a figure of hate for the Israeli right. As this film shows, he received dozens of death threats, his house was firebombed and he was harassed continually. The pressure became too much for his eldest son, splitting the family apart.
　　
　　Abushamsiya’s response was to assert the importance of non-violent resistance and the necessity of submitting to the rule of law. He formed a group called the Palestinian Human Rights Defenders and began training a group of local teenage activists, some as young as 12, to use video cameras in order to document alleged human rights abuses. His ultimate ambition – to alter the course of the Israeli occupation – may or may not be realised, but as this film shows, the video camera has given him and his young trainees a new sense of power and purpose. We follow Abushamsiya as he prepares his team for the intense reality of confronting violence with video cameras. The film includes several extended examples of their work, revealing the hostility between the two communities with rare immediacy.