As this report in +972 explains, governments across the Arab world have severely suppressed all expressions of support for Palestinians since October 2023, yet they have allowed all 14 episodes of the television series “Sohab Al-Ard” to be shown, providing viewers with a deeply moving dramatisation of the horrors that Gaza residents have endured over the past two and a half years. Such a series would be immensely useful in enabling people in the West to understand the genocide their governments have largely supported. But will it be dubbed or subtitled and shown in the West? Sadly, the chances are very slim.

Israel lambasted this Ramadan TV drama. Reception in Gaza has been mixed

‘Sohab Al-Ard’ has brought the genocide in Gaza to millions of living rooms across the Arab world. But does it achieve what it set out to?

By Shimaa Elyoussef March 17, 2026

Ansam Al-Kitaa was in Gaza City when she saw the trailer for “Sohab Al-Ard” (“People of the Land”), an Egyptian TV series made especially for Ramadan. As the first frames appeared on her phone, she began to cry. “It was not just scenes on a screen,” she told +972. “It was a mirror reflecting the pain we live with every day.” 

Al-Kitaa watched all 15 episodes from her home near the “Yellow Line,” which marks the edge of Israel’s occupation of more than half of Gaza since the so-called ceasefire in October. Despite repeated interruptions due to nearby shelling, demolitions, and a weak internet connection, she consumed the show in a matter of days. 

As a working journalist, Al-Kitaa has spent months documenting Israel’s massacres in Gaza — collecting interview testimony, photographing destroyed landscapes, and filming the daily lives of survivors. The new series promised to do what she has been trying to for over two years: show the genocide to millions of people who did not see it for themselves.

“I felt for the first time that this pain would not remain trapped in tents, destroyed alleyways, and ruined houses,” she said. “Perhaps our tears behind the camera lens will find their echo in a dramatic scene, or a dialogue that rattles the heart of a distant viewer, embodying even a small part of this suffering.” 

Indeed, this is the show’s intention. Mohammed Al-Diasty, who pitched the series to the United Media Services company — a conglomerate responsible for nearly 70 percent of Egyptian dramas — believed that creating a realistic portrayal of daily life in the Strip could humanize Gazans’ experiences since the start of the war. “The series seeks to document the scale of the tragedy the population is living, and how they remained steadfast despite losing the basics of life,” he told +972. 

Members of the cast and crew of Sohab Al-Ard on set in Egypt, February 2026. (Courtesy of United Media Services)

The show is part of this year’s Ramadan productions, the undisputed peak season for Arab television. Broadcasters and streaming platforms save their most ambitious productions for the holy month, when families gather nightly around the TV after sharing the sundown meal that breaks their fast. Advertising revenues peak during Ramadan, and satellite viewership across Egypt alone reaches more than 30 million households.

This year, there are 39 productions competing across satellite channels and streaming platforms. Alongside the traditional 30-episode run, this Ramadan features tightly structured 15-episode series like “Sohab Al-Ard,” reflecting a market increasingly focused on faster pacing.

“Sohab Al-Ard” is written by Ammar Sabri and directed by Peter Mimi, one of Egypt’s best-known filmmakers. The series follows a doctor played by renowned actor Menna Shalabi after she arrives in Gaza with a relief convoy, and a Palestinian father, portrayed by Palestinian-Jordanian actor Eyad Nassar, trying to find his nephew under the rubble. The series features several Palestinian and Palestinian-Jordanian actors, including Kamel El Basha, Tara Abboud, and Adam Bakri, the son of the late Mohammad Bakri. 

The show’s Palestinian actors felt a particular motivation to embed it with emotional weight and do the stories justice. “We acted through the situations and locations that our brothers there have lived through,” El Basha said of the filming process. “We wanted to deliver the feelings honestly.” 

To viewers, the show provided a long-awaited sense of recognition of Gazans’ lived experiences. “It returned us to the genocidal war that has not left our souls — to the repeated death and the loss that has become part of our daily life,” Wissam Zughbar, a journalist and human rights activist who has been trapped in Gaza throughout the war, told +972. “It presented the suffering with clear human dignity.”

Nevertheless, others who survived the war and appreciate the series do not believe any artistic portrayal can accurately convey the immense pain of the past two years. “No matter how creative the director is, reality will always exceed what can be shown on screen,” explained Mahmoud Al-Sharqawi, a lawyer originally from Gaza City and now displaced in eastern Gaza’s Al-Tuffah area.

He sees the show as a documentary series — not entertainment but testimony, an attempt to preserve memory against erasure. “It defends a Palestinian narrative that its people have long been unable to deliver through traditional means. When political and media spaces narrow, drama remains an open window.”

Ola Halilo, a Gazan viewer in her 40s, agrees that no drama can capture what Gaza has experienced. “Grief over family martyrs passed very quickly in the series as though loss was compressed into a few brief moments,” she said. “In reality, grief lingers, heavy and prolonged, and cannot be reduced to seconds.”

Notwithstanding its varied reception, the show has drawn impressive audiences across the Arab world. By the time the sixth episode aired on the Hayat channel, the series had reached at least 20 million viewers and topped Google searches in Egypt.

‘What we lived will not be forgotten’

Before the first episode of “Sohab Al-Ard” aired, Israeli television stations had already started attacking it, accusing the series of incitement for supposedly presenting a one-sided account of events in Gaza. Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster, criticized the series for failing to present a positive image of Israel. The Israeli military’s Arabic spokesperson, Ella Waweya, described it as “brainwashing and a distortion of the truth.” 

But fans of the series were not surprised or fazed by the criticism. The show’s very name —  “People of the Land” — disturbs the notion that Jews are the sole native inheritors of the land, which is fundamental to the state’s narrative.

More concretely, though, Ali Al-Asmar, a volunteer who worked in Gaza’s hospitals, suggested that Israel is threatened by a show that unveils its brutality. “[Israel hopes] testimony about the massacres they witnessed would not be transmitted,” he told +972.

“Drama, by its nature, is more effective than direct political discourse, because it addresses the conscience before the intellect,” film critic Ahmed Saad El-Din explained. “That is why Israel fears a work capable of deepening Arab popular sympathy and raising the level of anger toward its practices.”

Equally important is the fact that “Sohab Al-Ard” has provided a voice for the Palestinian struggle during a period when Arab governments are repressing pro-Palestine solidarity more than any other time in living memory. Throughout decades of conflict — from the 1948 Nakba to the start of the Gaza siege in 2007 — demonstrations in support of Palestine filled squares in Cairo, Tunis, Beirut, Amman, and Tripoli. But since the start of the war in Gaza, Arab states have cracked down on this tradition. 

In Egypt, at least 200 people have been detained since October 2023 for demonstrating, organizing, or expressing solidarity with Gaza. In March 2024, two minors were imprisoned for painting graffiti reading “Free Gaza” on a Cairo wall. The last major demonstration — which took place in Tahrir Square on Oct. 20, 2023 — criticized both the war and the Egyptian government, and was broken up with batons, tear gas, and mass arrests. Egypt’s streets have been silent ever since.

The same is true across the region. On March 6, Tunisian authorities detained several pro-Palestinian activists. Bahrain has arrested at least 57 people — including 25 children — for attending Gaza solidarity rallies. In Saudi Arabia, Hajj pilgrims were detained for wearing keffiyehs. The ghost of the 2011 Arab Spring has proven to concern Arab regimes more than the destruction of Gaza.

Against this backdrop, “Sohab Al-Ard” serves as a form of resistance to the world’s complicity, including the silence of much of the international entertainment industry. Jordanian director Iyad Shatnawi believes that by abandoning the Palestinian cause, Arab drama has largely failed to fulfill its mission. “The responsibility of drama makers requires documenting this phase historically and artistically,” he said. 

Yet some also see “Sohab Al-Ard” as a form of propaganda designed to placate Arab citizens’ anger over their governments’ complicity in the genocide. The show portrays Egypt as Gaza’s savior — consistently supporting residents with aid, humanitarian convoys, and diplomatic advocacy. Yet President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has been criticized by Egyptians and non-Egyptians alike for abandoning Palestinians in the Strip, suggesting the show may also serve a PR function. 

One episode features an airdrop of humanitarian aid — without showing the parachutes floating out to sea while people watched them sink; those who waded out to retrieve them; or those stabbed to death while fighting over remaining boxes. “I cried with all my heart,” a Gazan writer said in a social media post, “not because the scene was realistic, but because it was produced in a sanitized form.”

“Sohab Al-Ard” cannot return what was destroyed, bring back the thousands murdered, or release those still detained in Israeli prisons. But for Al-Kitaa, it does something else. “At a time when destruction tries to swallow everything, the story remains a form of resistance,” she reflected. “Drama remains a way to say: We are here. And what we lived will not be forgotten.”

Ansam Al-Kitaa contributed reporting to this story. 

This article was published in collaboration with Egab, a tech start-up empowering journalists from the Global South to get published in the international media.