Archiving Gaza: The Race to Save Evidence of War Crimes and Mass Destruction
Inside the dangerous effort to dodge censorship and document the horrors of Israel's war against Gaza.
Since October 7, 2023, Soliman Hijjy, a 37-year-old freelance visual journalist, has regularly spent hours trekking through the bombed-out landscape of the Gaza Strip, carrying a black safe of hard drives.
The drives contain drone footage, photography, videos, and voice recordings that capture the horror Israel unleashed in his native Palestine. The documentation—including evidence of possible war crimes—he’s compiled is extensive. Aerial photos, taken with his own drone, show the decimation of hospitals, mosques, and town squares. Videos and photos show barefoot people in the winter cold struggling to salvage tents that are collapsing under rainwater; children crying as they suffer from skin disease without medication, due to Israel’s blockade of aid; and children playing with dolls pulled from rubble. He’s filmed interviews with witnesses to attacks on civilians. As a journalist, he has also contributed to The New York Times’s coverage of Gaza. All of his material is obsessively filed away using an archival system he invented on the fly.
Hijjy’s archive shows the history of a place that is no more—and the process of its destruction in the deadliest war in the 21st century. If he died, he said, he didn’t want the memories he’d preserved to die with him. Some hard drives he left behind on a private plot of land, under the care of one of its residents. He locked others he couldn’t bear to part with in the small safe, trekking with it through multiple displacements.
“The main goal of this,” Hijjy told Drop Site News in November, “is to remember details of history you’d expect to be erased.”
Hijjy was posting some material on Instagram and X. But there was no guarantee it would remain online amid ongoing takedowns of Palestinian content. War-time Gaza’s tenuous internet, meanwhile, meant he couldn’t post much of what he collected. He put some files on Google Drive for safekeeping, but a communications blackout imposed by Israel—which often forced him to rely on e-SIM cards from abroad and 2G internet—left him unable to upload most of what he had. So he transferred what he considered his most important files to the external hard drives and categorized them, filling more than a dozen.
Over the course of the 15-month war, which came to a tenuous ceasefire on January 19, Israel, along with Egypt, have imposed a total ban on the entry of unembedded international journalists and investigators into Gaza—a ban that remains in effect. Meanwhile, Instagram, X, and Facebook have frequently removed and shadow-banned posts from Gaza—part of a wider pattern of censoring Palestinian content globally. The companies have often said they remove posts that violate community guidelines or standards, such as promoting graphic content or expressing support for terrorism, but these rules are applied overly broadly and erroneously. Meta, which owns Instagram, has continuously changed its guidelines for Gaza, even retroactively deleting photos and videos posted by journalists and activists.
In addition to what Palestinian journalists have published in the international press, photos and videos posted on social media have comprised nearly all of the war-time evidence to emerge from inside Gaza. People and organizations across the world have stepped in to help preserve this genocide’s history. They have been scraping, verifying, and storing information from social media before it can be removed; working on technological solutions for long-term search and storage; collecting witness testimony and other information from inside Gaza for submission to international courts; creating open-source tools to document civilian casualties by Israeli airstrikes; and compiling potentially incriminating statements made by Israeli political and military officials. Their efforts are loosely organized, under-resourced, and often not connected with one another.
As Palestinians return to what’s left of their homes under the fragile ceasefire deal, they are searching for those who have been trapped under rubble for months, many reduced to bones. The war has left more than 48,000 Palestinians dead, per the health ministry in Gaza local officials’ count, not including the estimated many thousands of people who are missing. Half of them are women, children, and the elderly, according to Palestinian health authorities, and the true number is widely believed to be higher. Critical infrastructure has been annihilated, and the United Nations estimates that 90% of Gaza’s prewar population has been internally displaced.
Documenters inside and outside of Gaza have worked to preserve the details of this carnage. Hijjy, who has been displaced seven times amid unrelenting airstrikes, said he hoped his files will eventually be incorporated into a larger documentation project. He has spent his adult life dedicated to his journalism work in Gaza, which to him is more than a profession. “The process of caring for and preserving the history and archive of your work,” he said, “is very similar to a father’s care for his only son.”
Examples of archival work, posted to Instagram, by Hijjy.
The Challenge of Documenting War Crimes
When Fred Abrahams, now an author and professor, traveled to war-torn Kosovo as a Human Rights Watch researcher in 1998, he found villages still smoldering from fires set by Serbian and Yugoslav forces, and forcibly displaced ethnic Albanians fleeing by foot. When he saw dead bodies lying in a gully, including women and children, he photographed them and immediately began to search for their names. He interviewed surviving witnesses of other Serbian massacres, and his colleagues also visited libraries to scour military and police magazines for evidence of operations, which he dubbed “old school open-source work.”
When former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević was tried for these war crimes in The Hague, Abrahams joined the prosecution as a witness. On the stand, he addressed Milošević directly: “Our evidence is overwhelming that the forces of the Serbian police and the Yugoslav Army did not adequately minimize damage and killing of civilians, and in many cases targeted them.”
Abrahams, who has spent nearly three decades conducting human-rights research and specializes in digital investigations, told Drop Site it’s essential to preserve war-time evidence quickly before it’s lost or destroyed. “The urgency is high,” he said.
Accountability requires evidence of crimes that are authenticated and properly stored. The U.N. has a range of guidelines on how to preserve evidence, including digital, that can be admissible in courts. “Courts are relying more and more on digital evidence,” Abrahams said. “If that evidence is being lost, then we’re losing important material to promote justice in the long run.”
Legal repercussions for committing war crimes can be elusive, but for many who work on documentation efforts, the goal is not just legal accountability, but to preserve things for the historical record. An archive ensures events aren’t eliminated from memory.
The manpower and resources required for a comprehensive archive is vast and expensive, Ahmad Obada, a coordinator with the Syria Justice and Accountability Center (SJAC), told Drop Site. SJAC was formed in 2012 to collect, authenticate, corroborate, and store social media posts showing the aftermath of airstrikes against civilians by the now-ousted Bashar al-Assad government. Their documentation has supported legal accountability and been cited by local and international media. SJAC has around 60 people working on legal cases, documentation, missing persons, analysis, and investigations. It is funded in part by the U.S. State Department, and paused many of its operations when the State Department froze “non-essential” funding under President Donald Trump.
SJAC built its own open-source technology to store the information it collects. The database has Excel-like rows of incidents with evidence for each airstrike or alleged war crime: text and voice interviews with victims and witnesses, government documents, and videos, including those posted on YouTube. Incidents are tagged and searchable for words like “explosion” and “barrel bomb,” available in English and Arabic, and display a chain of custody for each piece of information.
Over 10 years, SJAC has verified half a million out of the two million incidents it has collected. “We’ve been working for years and we are only 30% done,” Obada said. After October 7, he added, he spoke with a Palestinian rights organization interested in replicating SJAC’s open-source database. But he worried that the intensity of Gaza’s war meant it could take even longer for researchers to adequately archive it. “The data from there is never ending.”
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights
Documenters work with no protections in Gaza. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), a well-known nonprofit established in 1995, has spent years contributing research and documentation to international inquiries into Israeli conduct in Gaza. Its founder, Raji Sourani, has been a recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. But Israel has often subjected Palestinian research groups and their staff to allegations of terrorism. The PCHR’s headquarters was bombed early in the war.
Bassil Sourani, Raji’s 30-year-old son and the PCHR’s international advocacy officer, was also personally targeted. The Israeli military recorded and posted a phone call between Sourani and a friend, which it used to accuse each of being a “Hamas operative.” Two hours later, an Israeli airstrike hit his house. Sourani and his parents were in a hallway when the bomb struck another part of the house, sparing them from the blast. “If we [were] in any area in the house other than we were in, we should have been dead or critically injured,” he told Drop Site. “At the end of the day, they can reach anyone, everywhere.”
Sourani called the months since October 7 the most grueling and dangerous the organization has faced. A PCHR lawyer, Dana Yaghi, and documenter, Nour Naser Abu Nour, were killed by airstrikes on their homes in February 2024, three days apart, along with members of their families. One-third of the organization’s staff left Gaza, and those who remained had resorted to working from makeshift offices. Sourani fled to Cairo in December 2023. “The amount of strikes compared to previous wars and offensives, and no electricity or water, all prevented us from working properly,” he said.
In response to queries about the targeting of PCHR staff, the Israeli military and defense ministry replied with a blanket statement denying that it targets civilians or journalists. “Given the ongoing exchanges of fire, remaining in an active combat zone has inherent risks,” an unnamed spokesperson said via email.
Sourani said PCHR also lost funding from the German and Swiss governments after October 7, without being given reasons why. The German government told Drop Site it pulled planned funding from a PCHR project after the organization made a statement in which it “condoned armed resistance against Israel.” When asked for the statement, it did not provide one, saying it had been taken offline. The Swiss government said it did not renew funding to PCHR in December 2023, saying that the group was out of compliance with its “code of conduct and anti-discrimination clause.”
PCHR isn’t the only organization struggling to keep funding for Palestinian documentation work—a stark contrast with other recent conflicts. Western governments, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, along with foundations and individual donors poured resources into documentation efforts in and outside of Syria, and in Ukraine. “Depending on the conflict, the alignment with the foreign policy goals have to be here,” John Jaeger, a former State Department official tasked with conflict stabilization and co-founder of Hala, a project that curbed civilian harm by offering advance warning with information from thousands of audio files of Syrian government and foreign pilots discussing hits. Jaeger went on to preserve, verify, translate, and store this data, and even expanded the documentation project to Yemen. Hala has shared its findings with the United Nations and other accountability forums for use in trials and reports. When asked if the same support was supplied to preserving content from Gaza, Jaeger recounted a story with a government he did not name: “I walked through what we do and our methodology. I said I think we’re able to place IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] soldiers where atrocities were committed that they later denied, and it got real quiet.” The conversation awkwardly ended there. “Without saying it explicitly, they were like ‘no way.’”
And while PCHR researchers have scaled back its exhaustive documentation work into sampling, its efforts on the ground continue. Rahim (we’re not using his real name to avoid retaliation), a 38-year-old native of Gaza City is one of them. He lost his home and around 60 members of his extended family in the war. Although his wife and children managed to evacuate Gaza after eight months, he remained in Gaza to archive the conflict. “Moving forward is the only option,” he told Drop Site on WhatsApp in November.
More than a dozen PCHR field researchers like Rahim have kept up the work of collecting and verifying accounts of airstrikes against civilians, torture by Israeli troops, forced starvation, and the targeting of medical facilities and civil defense services. They’ve prioritized evidence to provide directly to the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice (ICJ), which have opened cases accusing Israel, respectively, of war crimes and genocide. The senior Sourani is a lawyer and member of the South African delegation at the ICJ, and PCHR has assisted with ICC investigations into prior Israeli offensives and other human rights violations committed by Israel in Gaza since 2015, when Palestine became a member.
Before the ceasefire, Rahim was living in a shelter in the center of Gaza and cramming himself into crowded vans, which operated on limited fuel, to get to and from sites of incidents he was investigating. “If there’s an airstrike on a civilian house, I’ll go speak to witnesses, count victims, take pictures of the destruction,” he said.
He collected his evidence first on paper, then took photos of his notes on his phone. Then he walked for hours from his shelter in the south through destroyed streets and demolished houses to Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, where there were solar-powered charging stations for his devices and a stronger internet connection. From there, he sent his files—painstakingly, over the still-sluggish connection—to his manager, also based in Gaza. The manager would review the material and send it to the PCHR team based in other countries.
That external PCHR team collaborates with other Palestinian rights organizations to submit verified research to the ICC. PCHR has also worked directly with the legal team from South Africa that initiated the ICJ’s genocide case in December 2023, providing evidence, including on-the-ground testimony, for dozens of cases of alleged war crimes. “You use your entire existence,” Sourani said, “to convey the picture of what’s happening.”
Digital Archives
Scores of Palestinians within Israel have been arrested for sharing content online deemed “incitement,” highlighting the risk to locals of posting information about the war. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented 70 arrests of journalists by Israel across the Palestinian territories since October 7—some held without charge, and some subjected to mistreatment and even torture. The Israeli military denied it was arresting journalists for their work, saying it had detained “individuals suspected of involvement in terrorist activity.”
Archival efforts based outside of Palestine, meanwhile, have stepped in to help. One is Mnemonic, a Germany-based organization specialized in creating archives that preserve vulnerable digital evidence in conflict zones. Its databases for Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, and Sudan are all posted on its website. But Mnemonic has kept its Gaza archive private due to concerns that added attention could result in “digital or physical attacks,” Hadi Al Khatib, its managing director, told Drop Site. “We want to do it low-profile,” he said.
Whereas the information that Rahim collects for PCHR is narrowed down into what can be submitted to international courts, Mnemonic scrapes social media to collect all potential violations of international law that it can find. It aims to centralize the evidence collected by Palestinian organizations, journalists like Hijjy, and regular civilians, as well as the work of other international NGOs. Al Khatib and one other researcher have scraped over 4 million data points from social media since October 2023. “There is a lot happening every hour,” he said. “It needs a team of 200 people looking into this.”
While it compiles this database, Al Khatib said, Mnemonic is also working on the most crucial step in the archival process: verification. It has collaborated with Palestinian organizations like PCHR to add witness statements, photo and video, and doctor’s notes for some of the incidents it scraped from social media. But professional documenters like Rahim inside Gaza have spent the war overwhelmed and facing nearly impossible conditions, making them largely unavailable to support outside archive efforts. So Mnemonic has thoroughly verified only a small portion of the cases they’ve collected.
It has prioritized getting verified information into legal cases against perpetrators of war crimes in a variety of countries and is working with Global Rights Compliance, a nonprofit that provides support to investigators and prosecutors working on international criminal cases.
Last October in Belgium, authorities launched an investigation into a Belgian-Israeli soldier who is part of a sniper unit accused of shootings of unarmed civilians. In January, an Israeli reservist vacationing in Brazil fled the country in the middle of the night, with the help of Israeli authorities, after a judge ordered police to conduct an investigation for war crimes based on evidence provided by the Hind Rajab Foundation, a Belgium-based Palestinian rights organization. HRF had submitted a complaint of war crimes to the ICC accusing 1,000 members of the Israeli military of carrying out a variety of war crimes, including looting, destruction of property, and attacks against civilians. The Israeli military told Drop Site that it “examines reports of videos posted on social media and handles them with command and disciplinary measures,” adding that cases where soldiers’ expression or behavior were found “inappropriate” were “handled appropriately.”
All digital archive efforts also face the risk of being corrupted over time. If copies aren’t made and refreshed to keep up with advancing operating systems and equipment, content can degrade to the point where it’s no longer accessible or usable. In short, digitization does not equal preservation. Just like perishable food needs to be sealed airtight so as not to spoil, digital material also needs to be stored and vacuumed or zipped so that original metadata—where something was taken, posted, or what it shows—is preserved, even if the original source disappears.
Another grassroots documentation effort, the Accountability Archive, created a storage system to prevent the loss of the information they collect. The archive gathers and preserves statements by politicians and other public figures that it determines to have expressed support for mass killings in Gaza. “We need to have a record of what people have said and how they justified violence on a massive scale,” Alex Foley, one of the group’s founders, told Drop Site, explaining the impetus for starting the archive. Since the crime of genocide must include intent, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and scholars of genocide have used statements by Israeli officials similar to the ones collected by the Accountability Archive to determine that Israel is committing genocide and other crimes against humanity. A volunteer effort with a core team based in the United Kingdom, the five-person project consists of three researchers, a developer, and an analyst. It has an advisory board of about a dozen more people.
They started by circulating a Google form, Foley said. But the team feared that Google could delete it, or that it could be lost to a virus or spyware. They now use a form—posted to their website—to which crowdsourced contributors can upload links to relevant statements. The form automatically creates an archived copy, while the team stores the information on private servers and back-up hard drives. By January, they’d stored over 53,000 data points.
“I start my day job and at 5, I do this until 10,” said Foley, who was working in the charity sector at the time he was interviewed by Drop Site. “It’s becoming a second full-time job.”
Accidental Archives
Incident date: October 28–29, 2024
Location: Beit Lahia, North Gaza
Strike type: Airstrike
Infrastructure: Apartment Building, Residential
Civilians reported killed: 129–254 (42–60 children, 28–37 women, 29–38 men)
Known belligerent: Israeli Military
For more than a decade, the U.K.-based nonprofit Airwars has been creating online entries like the one above to document civilian harm from airstrikes across the world. It has compiled archives for Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, and Ukraine. For Gaza, a team of 10, supported by 30 volunteers, has collected over 9,000 incidents, verifying close to 1,000. But funding remains the biggest obstacle—and an anomaly in Airwars’ history, Emily Tripp, its director, told Drop Site. “I’ve had conversations with foundations where publicly they’re very supportive of the cause, and then internally the politics of it means that they don’t invest, they don’t touch it,” she said.
“We saw how easy it was for those funders to mobilize around Ukraine,” she added. But when it came to Gaza, “suddenly all of them were hand-wringing and going through internal strategic conversations and deciding whether or not this was important.”
Tripp also emphasized how integral social media is to their work. “You have, on any given strike, a [member of the] Palestinian diaspora saying, ‘My relative was killed’; local journalists on the scene; family Facebook pages,” Tripp explained. “We’re deliberately looking for quite specific things.” This information, which lives on social media, is essential to triangulating their sources and establishing the facts of what happened on the ground.
“Social media companies need to start seeing themselves as accidental archives,” Tripp said. “You have tech companies who are willy-nilly in how they will regulate or not their own content, and they’re also not seeing themselves as holders of this incredibly important, valuable information for humanity.”
Companies like X have changed a lot in the years after the Syrian war. It used to be easy to pull large amounts of data from the site using search terms or other systems, like browser extensions and independent software that automatically scrape information. But since Elon Musk’s takeover and business restructure, X has put limitations on how much content researchers can access at a large scale, which is a baseline requirement for an archive. X’s strict anti-scraping measures block IP addresses attempting to pull data en masse and make mass information only available for purchase. In 2021, Facebook implemented AI machine learning tools, enabling it to quickly identify and block any type of scraping from its platforms, significantly slowing down the work of archivists.
Meanwhile, X suspended hundreds of accounts that it alleged to have been pushing hate speech, drawing critiques from digital rights groups that the platform had targeted accounts sharing important information about Israeli attacks. Within three months of the start of the war, according to Human Rights Watch, Meta was systematically censoring and suppressing Palestine-related content as well, tallying at least 1,050 takedowns from across 60 countries. In some cases, Meta alleged certain instances represented support for “terrorist groups” (Meta relies on the U.S. State Department, which designates Hamas as such, to make these calls). But Human Rights Watch found these posts did not even praise or support Hamas, but “instead were aimed at giving people context and information to understand the escalation in violence.” In other cases, without giving a reason, Meta took down prominent Palestinian accounts, including those of journalists. Among them is a Palestinian news agency, Al Quds News Network, whose Facebook page was permanently deleted and whose Instagram was temporarily suspended.
Meta has also retroactively deleted content posted by journalists in Gaza. Most famously, photography by Motaz Azaiza that documented the immediate aftermath of airstrikes with images of dead children’s limbs was found to go against guidelines of “sexual activity or nudity,” and even “pornography,” according to an AJ+ investigation, resulting in the takedown of dozens of his posts. In December 2023, Meta’s independent Oversight Board criticized the company’s automated takedown policy for Instagram posts with references to Hamas—a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, and also the local governance of Gaza. One post reinstated by the Oversight Board after being labeled as “hate speech” included videos of people killed and injured after an airstrike on a hospital. Meta’s takedown of Palestinian content has continued through evolving policies, such as targeting keywords like “Zionist”—which Meta says can be a proxy for hate speech—that often appears alongside content with information about civilian harm from Israeli strikes.
Hijjy, who has 165,000 followers on Instagram and 1,400 on X, said his posts were blocked or throttled because they contained images of bodies mangled by Israeli strikes; sometimes, his content was deemed “political” and in violation of Meta’s community guidelines. “I would avoid certain words like ‘attack’ and ‘Palestine’ out of precaution to ensure my posts wouldn’t be taken down,” he said. X, meanwhile, was purging dormant accounts. Hijjy wondered what would happen to his accounts if he joined the more than 200 journalists to be killed in the conflict.
To avoid triggering a takedown, activists have encouraged the use of coded language —spelling Palestine as Pale$tine, for example. As a consequence, search functions cannot yield productive results, because straightforward terms such as “Palestine” or “Gaza” won’t bring researchers to all the relevant content on these platforms, if it still exists. Even emojis such as the Palestinian flag and the red triangle, which is associated with the Qassam Brigades, are now subjected to takedown or shadowbanning (limiting the reach of any given post). Meta and X did not respond to requests for comment from Drop Site.
Meta and X also don’t offer added protections to accounts of journalists in Palestine or others serving a public information role in this conflict. Mahmud Hams, 44, is a photojournalist from Gaza with the French wire agency Agence France-Presse. He used to hold live broadcasts from his Instagram account that had 40,000 followers, showing the aftermath of airstrikes, or his team running from Israeli drone strikes, or children suffering from skin diseases. He’d stream from tents from Rafah to Nasser Hospital, and he’d convert those broadcasts into videos—a function offered and done wholly on Instagram—for users to share.
But in January, his account was hacked, the username changed, and all of the videos were deleted. He enlisted support from colleagues at AFP to help restore his account, but with no success. “I kept all of my work on this page so people would know what was happening in Gaza,” Hams told Drop Site. He managed to find some of the live broadcasts he’d converted into video reels saved on his phone. But as for the rest: “We’ve lost it.”
Gaza as It Was
Up until the ceasefire, Hijjy spent countless days alternating his focus between work and survival. When he wasn’t researching and recording, he was looking for a meal. “Life here isn’t stable,” he told Drop Site in December.
After the ceasefire, Hijjy finally returned home to Gaza City to find his house still standing—but no electricity, water, or internet, prompting him to return to Deir al-Balah, where utilities were more available, if unreliable. The pause in airstrikes has made movement easier and safer, and people are more reachable than before. But rebuilding Gaza’s destroyed infrastructure will be slow. Internet access remains shaky, because 75% of cell towers have been bombed, and there is a shortage of fuel to power those that remain operational.
The leveled landscape hinders travel, and many people are expected to remain in tents or otherwise displaced possibly for years, meaning that witnesses to past crimes would remain difficult to reach for documenters even with an end to the bombardment. Rebuilding efforts, such as clearing rubble, meanwhile, could result in lost evidence, while surveillance footage from facilities like hospitals and schools must be collected before it’s deleted or lost. At the same time, documentation is competing with the desire to return home, learn the fates of loved ones, and mourn. After visiting Rafah the day after the ceasefire came into effect, Rahim, the PCHR researcher, told Drop Site, “The extent of the destruction in the city is staggering.”
In the 20 years Hijjy spent reporting on Gaza before October 7, he captured and preserved images of Gaza’s sea line, busy roundabouts, and streets stretching for miles. That Gaza is gone: the streets turned to rubble, the destroyed infrastructure leaving trash and sewage to collect along the coast. He sees the full scope of his work as one that also shows people what Gaza was like before. “I want people to know what life was like here for many years before this great devastation obscured the beauty, stories, and daily life of this beautiful spot on Earth and its residents,” he said.
 | A guest post by
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The amount of sacrifice involved in doing this great cause against the various enemies is breathtaking. Thank you for informing us.
I am amazed by the persistence and courage displayed by these journalists who are documenting the destruction of Gaza! We owe all of them an enormous amount of gratitude.