Archive preserves 156,000 records of Israel’s Gaza assault

GAZA CITY, Palestine (MNTV) — A massive open-access digital archive has assembled more than 156,000 videos and photographs documenting Israel’s devastating military assault on Gaza and violence across the occupied West Bank, creating a permanent visual record of killings, injuries, destroyed homes, attacks on civilian infrastructure and mass displacement since October 2023.

The platform, Archive Genocide, describes itself as a group of researchers preserving material that could otherwise disappear from the internet and says the collection is intended for journalists, researchers, historians and legal accountability efforts.

Independent reporting on the project has documented its rapid expansion from more than 82,000 photographs and videos when it emerged publicly in July to more than 156,000 entries.

The scale of the repository offers a stark digital record of the human destruction inflicted during Israel’s assault on the Palestinian territory.

The archive contains footage associated with airstrikes on homes, attacks on hospitals and schools, killings of journalists and medical workers, displacement and thousands of individual incidents across Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

Unlike the fragmented flow of footage on social media, where posts can disappear when accounts are deleted, suspended or restricted, Archive Genocide attempts to preserve material alongside dates, locations, descriptions and links to original sources.

Its searchable database allows researchers to trace individual incidents rather than relying solely on footage circulating without context.

The project also maintains records of 72,835 Palestinians it identifies by name as having been killed in Gaza, turning an immense casualty toll into a searchable record of individual lives rather than leaving the victims represented only by statistics.

The archive’s operators say their purpose is to prevent evidence from vanishing as the war recedes from immediate public attention. Their stated principle — “We archive what others erase” — reflects an effort to preserve footage before original posts, accounts or other digital records disappear.

The project says its researchers submit evidence to the International Criminal Court, the Hind Rajab Foundation and lawyers working with South Africa in proceedings before the International Court of Justice.

Those claimed submissions have not been independently confirmed publicly by all of the institutions concerned and therefore remain claims by the archive’s operators.

Archive Genocide has also taken unusual steps to make the collection difficult to erase. Its downloadable releases contain 146,636 media files, while its live database currently lists about 156,915 entries.

The website itself has been made open source, allowing others to create independent copies of the repository.

Two curated downloadable releases alone contain more than 1.6 terabytes of material.

The first includes 82,386 media files occupying 864.5 gigabytes, while the second contains another 64,250 files occupying 778 gigabytes, including 45,036 videos and 19,214 photographs.

Behind those collections are approximately 2.4 terabytes of raw source archives assembled from journalists, documentation channels, social media accounts and other sources.

Among the preserved material are archives associated with Palestinian journalists and news channels, including Anas Al Sharif, Quds News and dozens of other accounts whose reporting formed part of the visual record of the assault.

The project distributes the material through torrents and independent mirrors, a decentralized approach intended to ensure that destroying one website or removing one social-media account cannot eliminate the underlying evidence.

The archive has also published cryptographic signatures and checksums allowing downloaded releases to be checked against the versions issued by the project.

That technical verification, however, establishes whether downloaded files match the archive’s released files; it does not by itself independently establish the circumstances depicted in every photograph or video.

Journalists, investigators and legal teams must still corroborate individual material through original-source tracing, geolocation, chronology, witness accounts and other evidence before drawing conclusions about a particular incident.

The distinction is significant because a repository containing more than 150,000 pieces of visual material cannot automatically be treated as more than 150,000 independently adjudicated cases.

The archive nevertheless preserves an enormous body of primary-source material that could otherwise be lost before investigators have an opportunity to examine it.

Its preservation effort comes amid extensive international scrutiny of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and continuing proceedings over alleged violations of international law.

The International Court of Justice has not issued a final judgment on whether Israel has committed genocide in the case brought by South Africa.

For Palestinians whose communities have been devastated, however, the archive serves another function beyond potential legal evidence.

It preserves names, places, images and moments that might otherwise disappear alongside destroyed neighborhoods and the people who documented them.

Israel’s assault has produced an extraordinary volume of digital evidence recorded by journalists, doctors, rescue workers and ordinary Palestinians, often on mobile phones amid bombardment and displacement.

Archive Genocide’s attempt to preserve that material means the visual record can potentially survive even when the original account, device, website or person behind the camera does not.

The result is a repository whose scale makes the destruction in Gaza difficult to reduce to casualty figures alone: tens of thousands of individual files preserve scenes of ruined homes, wounded civilians, destroyed infrastructure and Palestinian families confronting the consequences of more than three years of Israeli military operations.

Archive Genocide warns visitors that much of its material contains graphic images of death and severe injuries, including children, and says the footage is preserved not for casual viewing but for journalism, research, historical documentation and potential legal accountability.

As debates over responsibility, accountability and the historical record continue, the archive represents an effort to ensure that one element cannot easily disappear: the underlying visual documentation itself.