“Hind’s Hall” (stylized as HIND’S HALL) was released by Macklemore through social media on 6 May 2024.
The track broadly addresses the State of Israel’s attack on Palestinians in Gaza which began in October 2023. The attack, which has caused tens of thousands of casualties, overwhelmingly civilian, has been widely characterised as genocidal, including as plausibly amounting to genocide by the ruling of the International Court of Justice in South Africa v Israel.
More narrowly, the track addresses the 2024 encampment movement which took shape around the world in protest of other states’ response, or lack of response, to the Israeli attack. Macklemore, who is based in the United States, particularly criticises US institutions’ coercive, brute-force, often militarised response to student protesters using their (nominally) guaranteed rights to free speech.
“Hind’s Hall” is named in reference to Hind’s Hall, a building at Columbia University in Manhattan known as Hamilton Hall prior to its takeover by student protesters. The building was named in reference to Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl murdered by Israeli occupation forces. Hind’s fate is known because the civilian car she was riding in was disabled by an Israeli tank, killing most of her family and injuring her, whereupon her cousin placed a call to Palestinian emergency services crying and begging for help before also being killed. Hind subsequently spent three hours on call with Palestinian emergency services, allowing an ambulance to be dispatched and reach her. Upon its arrival, that ambulance was destroyed, and its crew and Hind were murdered, by the same or another Israeli tank.
Hind’s call was leaked online and instantly became a focus of widespread notoriety due to the cold, calculated nature of her and her family’s murder — Hind and her cousin’s calls and evidence from the scene consistently indicate Israeli forces were in the immediate vicinity and in visual range at the time of each killing, meaning there is no reasonable chance the Israeli tank crews did not fully realise what they had done. Moreover, the Israeli tank destroyed the ambulance after Israeli forces had provided the Palestinian Red Crescent Society and Gaza Health Ministry with a “guarantee” of safe passage and the ambulance had proceeded along a route laid out for that purpose. In addition, after the killing, Israeli spokespeople chose to lie about it and attempt to cover it up.
The song also features a sample from “Ana La Habibi”, by legendary Lebanese Arab singer Fairuz, to fit the theme of making a song for Palestine. Fairuz has also been vocal in her support for Palestine over the course of career with the album Jerusalem in my Heart, featuring the single “Zahrat al Madaen”, which became a pan-Arab anthem, releasing only two weeks after the 1967 Six-Day War.