Louis Theroux appears in Daniele Rugo's Life Support, a documentary built around doctors describing medical missions to Gaza since October 2023. The film puts medical eyewitness accounts at the center of the Israel-Hamas conflict at a time when foreign media access to Gaza is restricted.
Tanya Haj-Hassan, a Canadian paediatric intensive care doctor, says, "Dying children and grieving parents are a fact of her work" and adds, "But Gaza is that continuously," while wiping away a tear. Those words sit alongside accounts from Nick Maynard, James Smith and Victoria Rose, who describe marathon shifts, hunger, and personal loss among Palestinian colleagues.
Daniele Rugo and Life Support
Rugo's film gathers testimony from doctors who have made medical missions to Gaza since October 2023. The documentary presents them as rare witnesses in the absence of foreign media, giving the audience direct accounts from inside a war zone that outsiders cannot routinely enter without military escort.
The doctors describe a Palestinian surgeon taking sitting-down breaks during an operation to avoid blacking out from hunger. They also describe a Palestinian doctor bringing her teenage children to work because, if they die, they will die together.
Victoria Rose and the supplies
Victoria Rose, a reconstructive surgeon, arrived with 23 suitcases after putting a call to UK plastic surgeons for supplies. On a later visit, Rose was allowed to cross the border with just one suitcase. That shift gives a practical picture of how tightly medical access and equipment movement can be controlled, even for doctors trying to work.
James Smith, an ER doctor, says he tried to count the explosions on his first night in Gaza and lost track after several hundred. Nick Maynard, a gastrointestinal surgeon who has been visiting Gaza since 2010, says he had always seen destruction there, but after October 2023 it was on a different scale.
Gaza hospitals and IVF
The doctors also describe Gaza's only cancer hospital being destroyed and an IVF clinic being destroyed with all its embryos. Israel says Hamas uses hospitals as command centres and to hide weapons, while the doctors describe the targeting and destruction of medical infrastructure in Gaza. Those competing claims sit inside the film's broader argument about who can document what happens on the ground.
Life Support is scheduled for UK cinemas from 10 July. For readers who want the doctors' account of Gaza beyond the headlines, that date is the point at which the film becomes available to the public in the UK.
