‘Life Support’ review: Distressing, essential documentary follows volunteer medics into Gaza

Dir: Daniele Rugo. UK/Palestine/Qatar. 2026. 93mins

The testimonies of 10 doctors – most of them non-Palestinian volunteers working on short missions to Gaza during 2024 and 2025 – form the backbone of this distressing and damning documentary, which is sober in execution and furious in spirit. Harrowing on-the-ground video diaries and reflective studio interviews offer a portrait of a noble and non-partisan profession battling cruelty and indifference while working in some of the worst conditions imaginable. Life Support argues, without reservation, that these doctors witnessed a genocide. The accusation is delivered calmly, methodically and with the weight of first-hand experience and observation.

Sober in execution and furious in spirit

The documentary repeatedly makes the point that these doctors are the eyes of the world. ‘We are the vessel of their stories,’ says British surgeon Ana Jeelani, talking of Gaza’s two-million residents, who lived through a sustained Israeli military offensive after the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023. To be a visiting doctor in a territory where independent observers and international journalists are barred from entering adds a weight of responsibility beyond crucial medical support.

The first-hand testimonies collected by director Daniele Rugo, a UK-based Italian academic and documentarian (The Soil And The Sea, About A War) – who could not himself enter Gaza – make Life Support a significant addition to the reporting on the war. The film is released in the UK and Ireland on July 10 after a world premiere at Sheffield DocFest; specialist audiences elsewhere should also welcome the rare window it opens on the conflict.

Life Support does not get overly bogged down in the mechanics of how and why these doctors are present in Gaza, interesting though that is. Through their moving and eloquent accounts of their work we learn that they are usually on weeks- or months-long missions on behalf of NGOs such as Medical Aid For Palestinians. It’s also clear – especially from the recollections of repeat visits across 2024 and 2025 by British surgeons Victoria Rose and Nick Maynard, among others – that their ability to enter Gaza and bring supplies with them was progressively curtailed. (Baby milk powder was routinely confiscated at one point.)

The human cost of war, as seen through these doctors’ eyes, is the film’s chief interest. We hear – and see, sometimes in sickening detail – the effect of weapons blasts on children and adults. We see a hospital ward in bits after an explosion; a mass grave being excavated at Al-Shifa Hospital after it was ‘more or less levelled’ in April 2024. It’s a list that could go on and on. But British A&E doctor James Smith sums it up when he says what he has witnessed in Gaza ”are the most horrific things I’ve seen as an emergency doctor”.

There is a thoughtful balance between portraying the experiences (and, sometimes, the emotions, although the medical restraint is palpable) of these foreign doctors at work and reflecting the parallel experiences of their Gazan colleagues and patients. There’s a reminder, too, that medical care in a war zone doesn’t just extend to those injured by conflict. One doctor argues that cancer patients being denied pain relief when drug supplies run out amounts to ‘torture’.

In the absence of journalists and other observers, these doctors find themselves answering questions beyond their usual remit and expertise. The consensus among the film’s interviewees is that they are working amid a co-ordinated genocide or ‘ethnic cleansing’ (different medics land on different terms); we see Canadian doctor Tanya Haj-Hassan testifying as such to the U.N.

The filmmakers avoid dwelling on what must have been a difficult production process; we’re left to imagine the challenges of making video diaries in these circumstances and of finding a narrative among the chaos of war. (As a viewer, it’s difficult enough to follow the timeline of the hospitals attacked, reconstructed, reopened and again attacked.) Some knowledge of the wider conflict and political context is assumed; this is a film designed to build on general reporting, not repeat it. A mournful quiet score by Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja and others, plus a voiceover reading by Irish actress Denise Gough of excerpts of the 2025 essay ‘Beneath The Howl Of Hunger’, are subtle poetic additions to a film in which the gathered recollections and imagery are powerful enough alone to provoke anger and sorrow.