Bombings, gutted buildings, cries of horror, lifeless, charred bodies, and the weeping and screaming of children, women and men: For 1 hour and 32 minutes, atrocious images from the devastated Gaza Strip were shown at France's Assemblée Nationale on Wednesday, May 29. Only around 15 MPs – most of whom hailed from the left, a few from the presidential bloc and two from the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) – responded to the invitation from MP Aymeric Caron, of the radical left La France Insoumise (LFI) . His film, entitled Gaza depuis le 7 octobre ("Gaza since October 7"), goes back over the seven months of the Israeli offensive in the Palestinian territory, following the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023.

Presented by the LFI politician as a "documentary," it is supposed to represent the "daily life" of Gaza's residents unde the Israeli army's strikes. Featuring subtitles but no voice-over, none of the footage was blurred. Most of images were collected on social media, from "journalists, photographers, film-makers, healthcare workers and residents of Gaza," and then verified by him and his team, explained Caron, asserting that there are "no images of Hamas."

"It's a film that has decided to take an interest in the fate of Gazans," the former journalist told the press. At the end of the screening on Wednesday evening, his colleague Rodrigo Arenas, one of the eight LFI members present, had tears in his eyes: "It's [a] super-violent [film], but it is reality that is violent. The question now is, what do we do? France's position is no longer tenable today."

The decision to focus solely on "the fate of Gazans" did not go unnoticed. "It's overwhelming to see these images," conceded Julien Odoul, of the RN, before adding: "But between what happened on October 7 [2023] and what the Palestinian people have been going through since then, there's only one [entity] responsible, which was cruelly absent from these images, and that's Hamas."

'Competing victimhoods'

Although he has denied it, Caron's approach echoed that of Mathieu Lefèvre, MP for President Emmanuel Macron's Renaissance party, and president of the Assemblée's France-Israel friendship group. In mid-November 2023, he organized a screening at the Assemblée Nationale of a film edited by the Israeli authorities using images of the massacres committed by Hamas in Israel on October 7. That day, dozens of MPs had packed into the room, including Caron. Seven months later, in an almost empty room, he denounced the "disinterest of this Assemblée in the fate of Gazans."

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