Bearing witness: websites document Gaza’s catastrophe for the ages
Nir Hasson reports in Haaretz on 7 October 2026:
In June 2025, as hunger spread in the Gaza Strip, 5-year-old Abdullah Abu Zarqa was filmed crying, “I’m hungry.” His malnutrition might very well have caused his rickets as well; his mother said he was too weak to hold a glass of water, and he asked why he couldn’t walk like the other kids. His story quickly went viral, and under international pressure, he was evacuated to a hospital in Turkey. But it was too late – Abdullah died that August.
In recent months, it has often been claimed in Israel that there was never hunger in Gaza, with the blame put on a successful Hamas PR campaign and antisemitic smears in the West. It is true, based on recently published mortality data, that there was never a Level 5 mass famine in the Strip, the worst level, as the United Nations claimed about a year ago. But for Abdullah and hundreds of other children and adults who died of malnutrition, the hunger was all too real.
Over 200,000 documents
Abdullah’s story and those of other hunger victims can be found on the website Archive Genocide, probably the most comprehensive attempt to document, verify and archive what is still happening in Gaza three years in. The site has interviews with doctors and hundreds of videos showing, for example, starving children in hospital beds, crowds rushing for food at Gaza Humanitarian Fund distribution points, and two children trying to gather flour spilled on the ground.
Archive Genocide is one of dozens of projects documenting the humanitarian disaster and suspected war crimes in Gaza. Like Archive Genocide, some projects strive to aid legal proceedings against Israeli politicians and soldiers. Others are working as part of research projects, or to provide a basis for rights groups’ reports, or to help in commemoration projects for victims.
There are websites specializing in graphs – from food prices in Gaza to the number of wounded and destroyed homes – and sites collecting reports, testimonies or details about victims.
The UN site ReliefWeb, for example, aggregates reports and news articles on Gaza – about 11,000 of them – while GazaIndex provides data on the humanitarian disaster. These and other database websites on the Strip are usually in English or Arabic, but there are also Israeli projects available in Hebrew.
An airstrike on Gaza City last month, part of the reality not explored in detail in Israel’s mainstream media. Credit: Jehad Alshrafi/AP
A perusal of Archive Genocide is an extremely difficult experience, even for anyone accustomed to the sights of the war in Gaza. There are tens of thousands of videos: children’s bodies wrapped in plastic bags; wounded children, sometimes amputees covered in blood; stunned parents searching for their children in the rubble, hospitals or morgues; displaced people in waterlogged tents; mass graves and stray dogs eating bodies in the street.
There are also videos of soldiers celebrating the destruction of homes, and Israeli politicians, generals and journalists calling for war crimes and crimes against humanity. In one video, right-wing TV host Shimon Riklin explains in December 2023 that he can’t fall asleep until he sees homes collapsing in Gaza and adds: “More, more, so they have nowhere to return to.”
The site also has a few videos from October 7 – kibbutz residents are referred to as “settlers,” the hostages as “prisoners” and Hamas men as “resistance fighters.” But especially uncomfortable for Israelis used to their country’s mainstream media are the sights from Gaza, accompanied by commentary blaming all Israeli society, not just the military, for the worst crimes.
Archive Genocide is the largest collection of evidence against Israel. Last week, the editors declared that the site contains over 200,000 documents, including more than 100,000 video clips from media outlets, social media, drones, civilians, doctors, Israeli soldiers and others. The editors say they have so far confirmed the authenticity of over 35,000 of the videos.
The site’s editors fear Israel and are keen to preserve their anonymity. In written questions in English, Haaretz asked how they verify the videos. “The best way to verify footage is to verify the source itself,” one editor replied. “We established which journalists were uploading the most footage and focused on them first. From there we use standard verification methods: video metadata and multiple angles of the same event from multiple sources. Geolocation is also a strong method, because it establishes where an event took place.
“Witness testimony and footage of the aftermath help establish the timeline of events and confirm what happened. As I am sure you know, there is no shortage of footage of slaughter in Gaza, it is arguably the most well documented genocide in modern history.”
The project began exactly one year after the October 7 massacre, after its initiators said they noticed that social media sites, including Instagram and TikTok, were removing videos and blocking accounts that uploaded clips from Gaza. “These platforms were taking down the most serious crimes, and in many cases entire journalists’ profiles – effectively erasing them from existence,” Archive Genocide added.
“Thousands of smaller personal accounts were being erased too, many of them people who had uploaded footage of their neighbors or their own deaths. We found this extremely offensive to erase such evidence, a step beyond the evil we are used to seeing in the world. We also noticed that most of the large tech platforms were involved in this, platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok and most mainstream social media.”
According to the editors, 25,000 volunteers around the world collect, upload and categorize the materials. They also call on the public to download the archive to local servers and mobile storage devices to protect it from deletion attempts by Israel or tech giants.
They also send the materials to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, to the Hind Rajab Foundation, which works to prosecute Israeli soldiers and officers, and to the South African prosecutors handling the case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
The site is currently accessible in 25 languages, including Hebrew. It includes hundreds of statements by Israeli politicians calling for war crimes, a search engine that allows the linking of events to people, and now also the Iris artificial intelligence engine, which is proficient in all documentation from Gaza, the editors say.
According to the editors, the goal is for Iris to be the greatest expert on what they consider the genocide in Gaza, capable of answering any question on the subject. They pledged this in a recent video that, like all their videos with a narrator, has the person masked and wigged with a digitally distorted voice.
An Israeli perspective
The largest Israeli project is the website Bearing Witness Gaza, launched two and a half years ago by Hebrew University historian Lee Mordechai. The site has 184 pages with more than 21,000 references to tens of thousands of sources, including videos, journalists’ investigations, reports from humanitarian organizations and posts on social media.
Liat Kozma, a Hebrew University historian of the Middle East, joined Mordechai, and today the project has more than 120 volunteers.
“The goal is that when somebody cares, on the day Israeli society has the desire or courage to look in the mirror five years from now, 20 years from now, 50 years from now, it will have the necessary sources,” Kozma says. “We also work almost exclusively in Hebrew and English to tell Israelis: Everything exists, and you can know if you want to.”
The heart of the site is its Gaza Archive, which currently has 1,318 entries – reports, investigations, testimonies, videos – collected from a variety of sources. Cataloging has been done manually, but with the help of Israeli high-tech professionals, an AI engine will soon accelerate the process. Another 10,000 items are awaiting upload.
“I imagine it like Wikipedia; something that can provide an answer and an authoritative source of information for any question on what happened in Gaza,” Mordechai says. The site also contains 243 translated and categorized testimonies from doctors and other medical staff who worked in Gaza during the war.
One section focuses on statements by senior Israeli officials calling for crimes against humanity in Gaza, from Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu, who said Israel should “attack food warehouses; Gazans must starve,” to Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman, who called for Gaza to be emptied of Gazans, to National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who in February 2025 wrote on X that Israel should “destroy, demolish, eradicate, erase, crush, smash, burn, brutalize, punish, devastate, pulverize. Destroy!” Another 1,500 statements are awaiting classification, including those by journalists and cultural figures. “The goal is to provide a broad picture of the discourse that enabled this,” Mordechai says.
The site also includes an interactive map of killings and the destruction of Gaza. Hundreds of incidents that underwent geolocation – identification based on structures and landmarks – are marked on the map. The identification is mostly done by geolocation experts in Gaza who publish on X, notably Abu Location and Anno Nemo.
The map shows the location of hundreds of attacks verified by the British organization Airwars, considered the gold standard for cross-referencing and verifying civilian casualties in airstrikes around the world. Over the three years, the organization has collected 16,000 reports of attacks resulting in civilian casualties in Gaza.
Of these, 1,586 attacks have been cross-referenced and verified, with most listing the names of affected civilians, the location, the Israeli military’s response and documentation from the scene and hospitals. The collection is done slowly – without AI. For example, the organization documented the bombing of the Abu Eida family home in the Jabalya refugee camp on November 1, 2023.
“Airwars has identified the names of all 86 civilians killed in the incident based on tributes on social media to the victims … Civilians reported killed. 86-90. 30-42 Children, 25-30 Women, 19-25 Men,” says the website, which links to dozens of photos showing the aftermath of the attack.
Hebrew-language social media features documentation and commemoration projects operating far from the Israeli mainstream. For example, conflict researchers Assaf David and Maya Rosenfeld translate and publish reports from Gaza, while Ayelet Ben-Yishai and Lior Levy from the University of Haifa run biweekly Zoom meetings with researchers and experts called Eyes on Gaza.
Another Israeli project, psychologist Adi Ronen Argov’s Forcibly Involved, documents children killed in the conflict on both sides. A post this week features a photo of a smiling child in an ironed button-down shirt and a green sweatshirt.
“Mohammed Saif al-Din Al-Shakhreti (8), was here, and not anymore,” Ronen Argov wrote in English. “Shot and killed while playing with a ball near the tent for displaced persons where he lived. Al Mawasi, Rafah, September 26, 2026.”
This article is reproduced in its entirety