Archive Against Erasure: The Website Preserving Gaza’s Digital Record

R Powell

28 minutes ago

ArchiveGenocide.com has assembled a vast, decentralised collection of videos, photographs, victim records and source material from Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Its scale makes it an important historical repository, although preserving a file and proving what it depicts remain two distinct tasks.

Content warning: The website examined in this feature contains extremely graphic images of death, severe injury and violence, including footage involving children. A small number of direct links are included because the records are discussed in detail. Each is clearly identified before the link. Readers do not need to watch them to follow the article. Research for this article was checked on 27 August 2026.

The first thing a visitor encounters at ArchiveGenocide.com is not an image but a warning. The archive contains graphic footage from Gaza and the occupied West Bank, the screen says, collected for documentation and accountability. Only after acknowledging the warning can the visitor enter a gallery that attempts to preserve, classify and make searchable an enormous visual record of Palestinian death, injury, displacement and destruction.

The material is difficult to view, but that difficulty is central to the project’s purpose. Archive Genocide presents itself as a defence against disappearance: the disappearance of a social media post, the suspension of a journalist’s account, the destruction of a mobile telephone, the death of the person who filmed an attack, or the gradual rewriting of a war after public attention has moved elsewhere.

The project’s declaration is blunt: “We archive what others erase.” Its anonymous organisers describe themselves as a group of researchers archiving footage from Gaza and the West Bank for journalists, researchers, historians and legal teams. They say the material is submitted to the International Criminal Court, the Hind Rajab Foundation and lawyers working with South Africa in its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. The archive’s claimed submissions have not been publicly confirmed by those institutions, so they should be reported as statements by the organisers rather than as independently established fact. Archive Genocide’s About page sets out the group’s stated mission, while its submission page describes how contributors are asked to provide footage and contextual information. An independent report by The Daily Star raised the same qualification about the claimed legal submissions.

What is already clear is that Archive Genocide represents one of the largest public attempts to gather the scattered digital record of the assault on Gaza into a single, accessible system. It is simultaneously a media library, a memorial, a source directory, a map, a collection of daily reports and a downloadable set of archives designed to survive even if the main website disappears.

A record too large for one website

Archive Genocide was publicly launched in early July 2026. At launch, reports based on figures supplied by the organisers described more than 64,500 videos and nearly 18,000 photographs gathered from over 300 journalists, photographers and field sources. Those numbers have since changed as additional collections have been imported and duplicate files removed. The European Palestinian Council for Political Relations reported the launch figures on 6 July 2026.

The project’s current download page lists two curated media releases. Volume One contains 82,386 files occupying 864.5GB, while Volume Two contains a further 64,250 files occupying 778GB. Together, the two releases contain 146,636 media files. Volume Two alone is described as eight imported archives containing 45,036 videos and 19,214 photographs. Elsewhere on the same page, the open source website package is described as containing gallery metadata for 146,864 entries. Behind the curated releases sit approximately 2.4TB of raw source material divided into five much larger collections.

These totals should not be treated as interchangeable. A raw source file, a deduplicated video, a photograph, a gallery entry and an indexed public clip are different units. The live gallery displayed a still newer total of 156,913 entries, comprising 115,710 videos and 41,203 photographs, when checked for this article. The static, search engine accessible section of the site advertises a smaller indexed subset, while the downloadable releases and metadata are snapshots created at different stages of the import process. The differences do not necessarily indicate an error, but they show why the archive should publish a clearer, regularly updated accounting of what each number represents. The archive’s download page gives the project’s release figures, file counts and volume descriptions, while its public browse index exposes records to conventional search engines.

The raw volumes reveal the breadth of the collection. They include backups from Telegram documentation channels, the Eye on Palestine Instagram account, the former TikTok Genocide website, Twitter and Instagram accounts belonging to journalists, geolocation datasets and material posted by Israeli soldiers or collected by groups tracking alleged perpetrators. One 910GB volume contains Twitter and Instagram archives associated with reporters and news channels. Another 710GB volume contains a backup of the Evidence Task Telegram channel covering October 2023 to June 2025.

The distinctions among those releases are important for anyone planning to report from, investigate or mirror the collection:

Release	Published size and count	What the archive says it contains	Principal research use and limitation
Curated media, Volume One	864.5GB; 82,386 files	The original deduplicated, in-scope selection of Gaza and West Bank material from 2023 to 2026	The most manageable starting collection, but “curated” does not mean that every caption has been independently proven
Curated media, Volume Two	778GB; 64,250 files	An October 2023 backfill, rescued Evidence Task material and newer additions from eight archives; 45,036 videos and 19,214 photographs	Extends the early-war record and imports later rescues; it shares a folder structure with Volume One so torrent software can merge them without downloading duplicates
Raw Gaza Volume One	384GB	Early mixed backups, a November 2024 Evidence Task pull, Eye on Palestine, the complete TikTok Genocide site, Twitter and X profile backups, soldier and alleged-perpetrator tracking, and supporting datasets	Broadest and most heterogeneous; valuable for provenance searches but likely to contain reposts, duplicates and uneven metadata
Raw Gaza Volume Two	67GB	A supplementary consolidated collection gathered from several sources	A smaller catch-all volume whose description gives less source-level detail than the others
Raw Gaza Volume Three	910GB	Twitter, X and Instagram archives associated with Anas al-Sharif, Gaza Notification, Motassem al-Dalloul, Times of Gaza, Sarah Wilkinson, Quds News and The Cradle, plus roughly 99 Instagram journalist accounts	The largest source-account collection and especially valuable when original profiles or posts have disappeared
Raw Gaza Volume Four	710GB	The complete Evidence Task Telegram backup, covering October 2023 to June 2025, with tens of thousands of videos, news clips and information about soldiers or alleged perpetrators	A chronological documentation channel rather than a uniform set of camera originals; descriptions must be traced back through the reposting chain
Raw Gaza Volume Five	553GB	Telegram backups from Suppressed News, Dr Hashem al-Shehari, journalist Moad al-Hams, Anas al-Sharif, Palestinian Observer, RNN Prisoners, Gaza Real News, Alnasht, Children of Gaza and Israel Exposed, plus geolocation datasets	Useful for cross-source searches and location work, but mixes reporting, advocacy, aggregation and investigative collections

The raw volumes listed separately add up to 2,624GB. That is about 2.6TB in decimal units or approximately 2.4TiB, which helps explain why the download page describes the total more loosely as “about 2.4TB.” The figures and descriptions are supplied by the project rather than measured independently. Every large release is distributed by torrent, with the raw volumes mirrored by Distributed Denial of Secrets; the archive warns that a downloader’s internet address is visible to other members of a torrent swarm. The complete download inventory also links to checksums, signatures and mirror files.

Who created, collected and preserved the material

There is no single answer to the question of who “contributed” to Archive Genocide. The anonymous people operating the website curate and repackage a record made by several different communities. In many entries, the person who filmed an event, the account that first published it, the channel that reposted it, the volunteer who added a caption and the organisation that now mirrors the file are five different contributors.

The closest layer to the events is the network of Palestinian journalists, photographers, medical workers, rescuers and residents who recorded what they saw. The source directory highlights Motaz Azaiza, Plestia Alaqad, Wael al-Dahdouh, Hamza al-Dahdouh, Anas al-Sharif, Ismail al-Ghoul, Hossam Shabat, Hind Khoudary, Youmna El Sayed, Bisan Owda, Mosab Abu Toha, Yousef Alhelou, Mohamed al-Masri, Fadi al-Wahidi, Mahmoud Ajjour and Nahed Hajjaj. The raw volumes and gallery contain hundreds of additional account handles. Some contributors are professional correspondents; others are photographers, doctors, volunteers or residents whose telephones became the only available cameras. The site identifies several of the journalists, including Anas al-Sharif, Ismail al-Ghoul and Hossam Shabat, as having been killed.

A second layer consists of Palestinian news feeds and aggregators. Quds News Network is listed with 16,820 items; Eye on Palestine with 6,860; Gaza Now with 3,246; Times of Gaza with 2,779; Gaza Notification with 1,660; Suppressed News with 6,315; and Alnasht with 1,050. These channels can preserve material from the ground rapidly and at scale, but their presence in a source field does not necessarily mean that the channel’s staff filmed the clip. A reporter using the archive must continue through the source chain and identify the camera operator or earliest surviving upload whenever possible.

A third layer is made up of deliberate archival and documentation projects. Evidence Task is by far the largest source collection listed, with 66,220 items. The former TikTok Genocide site contributes 17,843 records described as incident documentation. Children of Gaza contributes 9,000 items. Israel Exposed, described as the archive organisers’ own Telegram and Discord collection, contributes 14,247. Tracking Israel Genocide and Israel Genocide Tracker preserve 1,100 and 288 items respectively, much of it material originally posted by Israeli soldiers or collected to identify alleged perpetrators. The daily reports section is credited to Sara A. D. and consists of 516 day-by-day reports beginning at Day 126 of the war. The project’s source directory publishes these counts and descriptions.

That category of perpetrator-posted material is especially significant. An Israeli soldier who uploaded a demolition, a unit briefing or humiliating treatment of detainees was not intentionally “contributing” to Archive Genocide, but the soldier may have created the primary recording. Volunteer monitors then copied it before the account was restricted or the post removed. Such material can carry different evidentiary value from an aftermath video because it may show the actors, their uniforms, spoken instructions, unit insignia or the sequence leading to an act. It can also be propaganda, staged, selectively edited or detached from its original date, making authentication and contextual investigation essential.

Finally, preservation infrastructure is itself a contribution. Distributed Denial of Secrets mirrors the raw volumes. Independent torrent users seed copies. The developers published the front end, servers and metadata under an MIT licence through GitHub and Codeberg, allowing third parties to rehost the gallery. Geolocation volunteers and external mapping projects add location data. Tech for Palestine supplies the named-dead dataset used by the memorial. None of those participants should be conflated with the people who filmed the events, but without them the files would be far more vulnerable to loss.

The website’s organisers remain anonymous, and the source directory does not disclose a complete roster of editors, translators or verification researchers. The page says accounts have been vetted by the project’s community as credible firsthand sources, but it does not identify who conducted each review or publish a source-by-source audit. For a news organisation or court, contributor attribution must therefore be established at the level of the individual record rather than inferred from the archive’s brand.

What the recordings contain

The archive does not tell one continuous story. It contains tens of thousands of fragments: the aftermath of air strikes on homes, tents and public spaces; wounded children arriving at hospitals; funerals and bodies recovered from rubble; injured people describing what happened to them; families searching for missing relatives; attacks on people seeking food; damage to medical facilities; forced displacement; hunger; amputations; and the destruction of streets, neighbourhoods and civic life.

Some entries consist largely of a copied social media caption and a date. Others are more structured, recording a source, a location, descriptive tags, a link to the original post and notes added by an archivist. An entry from November 2024, for example, identifies the reported bombing of a family home in Khan Younis, names the area, records the number of reported deaths, preserves the Arabic source text and supplies an English explanation. Another records an interview outside a bombed barbershop in Gaza City and distinguishes the witness’s account from the archivist’s notes.

That variation matters. The archive brings otherwise scattered material into one place, but the quality of its descriptive metadata depends heavily on the source collection. A caption written in the first minutes after an attack is not equivalent to a completed investigation. A reposted video may be genuine while its location, date or description is wrong. A scene may accurately show civilian suffering without establishing which weapon was used, who fired it, whether the target was military or whether the attack was lawful under the rules of war.

The site nevertheless gives researchers a starting point that would be extremely difficult to reconstruct after the original accounts had vanished. A journalist can search a place name, hospital, date or source. An investigator can compare several posts from the same incident. A historian can examine how the destruction of one neighbourhood unfolded over time. A family member may be able to locate a record that would otherwise have been lost in the flow of social media.

Five recordings with particular evidentiary weight

The most shocking file is not necessarily the most useful file in court. A clip showing terrible injuries may establish the human consequence of an attack while revealing little about the attacker, the target or the decision that preceded it. A less graphic recording may be more probative if it captures a commander’s order, contradicts an official account, retains an original timestamp or can be matched to satellite imagery and several independent cameras.

The following records were selected not as a hierarchy of suffering but because each combines difficult visual or audio material with a legal issue already before the International Court of Justice or International Criminal Court. “Potentially probative” is the necessary phrase. The ICJ determines the responsibility of states; the ICC prosecutes individuals. Neither court can treat an archive caption as a verdict, and the archive is not known to possess a complete evidentiary chain for every item.

1. The final recording of the Rafah medics

Warning: the linked recordings contain gunfire, fear and the last known words of emergency workers who were subsequently killed.

On 23 March 2025, Israeli forces killed 15 emergency and humanitarian workers in the Tal al-Sultan area of Rafah: eight Palestine Red Crescent Society paramedics, six Civil Defence responders and one United Nations employee. The archive preserves a 44-second version showing the marked vehicles and their emergency lights, as well as a two-minute, 29-second recording attributed to PRCS and medic Rifaat Radwan. Radwan is quoted before setting out to reach colleagues who had already come under attack: “There will be no one left.”

This material is potentially among the archive’s most legally significant because the camera did more than record suffering. It preserved the state of the ambulances, their illuminated emergency signals, the workers’ conduct and the onset of fire. Israel’s first account said troops had fired on vehicles advancing suspiciously without headlights or emergency signals. After video from Radwan’s telephone became public, the military acknowledged that the earlier account was inaccurate. Its subsequent investigation found professional failures, breaches of orders and an incomplete report; the deputy commander of the Golani Reconnaissance Battalion was dismissed. The military continued to deny that the workers were executed or that the fire was indiscriminate, said six of those killed were militants and described the incident as an operational misunderstanding in a combat zone. The IDF’s published findings set out that position.

A June 2025 communication by United Nations special procedures reported that PRCS released recordings lasting six minutes, 47 seconds and 19 minutes, six seconds. It said forensic analysis identified more than 150 shots in the first 30 seconds, beginning at an estimated distance of 40 to 45 metres and moving closer. The communication expressly said it was writing “without prejudging” the allegations, but stated that the video directly contradicted the claim that emergency lights were not operating. The full UN communication to Israel includes the incident chronology, forensic allegations and the IDF’s replies as they then stood. A separate Sky News visual, audio and satellite investigation concluded that the available evidence contradicted elements of both Israel’s initial and later accounts.

For the ICC, the recordings could be relevant to possible intentional or reckless attacks on protected medical personnel, murder and later efforts to conceal or mishandle evidence. Their value would depend on authenticating the phone, extracting the original files and metadata, reconstructing the shooters’ positions, identifying the soldiers and commanders, and proving what each individual knew. For the ICJ, the incident could contribute to a wider pattern of attacks on the systems needed to keep Palestinians alive, but one event by itself would not prove the specific intent required for genocide.

2. A Golani commander’s instruction before operations in Rafah

Warning: the linked clip contains a recorded military instruction that appears to authorise firing at any visible person.

In a 29-second video dated 3 April 2025, a man identified in the archive and subsequent reporting as a commander of the Golani reconnaissance unit addresses soldiers before Division 36 enters Rafah. The translated order is stark: “Everyone you encounter is an enemy. If you spot a figure, open fire, eliminate, and move on.” The archive record preserves the video, a repost source and a downloadable file reference. The same footage was examined in the Sky News reconstruction of the killing of the Rafah medics, who were shot by members of the Golani unit later that month.

Unlike a video of an aftermath, the briefing may bear directly on rules of engagement, the duty to distinguish civilians from fighters and command responsibility. It could also help prosecutors ask whether later shootings were errors that departed from lawful orders or foreseeable results of an instruction to treat every visible person as an enemy. The evidentiary questions remain substantial: investigators would need the original recording, the full unedited briefing, a reliable translation, the commander’s identity, the date and place, the unit’s formal written orders, and evidence connecting the words to particular crimes.

The clip is also relevant to the ICJ’s genocide analysis, but only as part of a much larger body of evidence. Genocidal intent cannot safely be inferred from one battlefield statement without resolving context and attribution. The more immediate legal concern is that an instruction making no distinction between a civilian and a combatant appears incompatible with the basic principle of distinction. Israel’s later internal review of the medics’ killings found breaches of orders and failures by the Golani field commander, while maintaining that the unit as a whole was professional and that the casualties resulted from errors rather than a policy of attacking civilians.

3. Shaaban al-Dalou burning in the Al-Aqsa Hospital camp

Warning: the linked record and static archive page show a young man burning alive and other people with severe burns. This is among the most graphic material discussed in this article.

Shortly after an Israeli strike in the early hours of 14 October 2024, fire spread through tents occupied by displaced families in the grounds of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah. Several witnesses filmed 19-year-old software engineering student Shaaban al-Dalou trapped in the flames. The archive’s individual record and its static page of related clips preserve multiple angles, aftermath footage and family testimony. One archived voice cries: “People are burning before our eyes and we can’t help them!”

The footage is visually devastating, but its legal force comes from corroboration. Reuters verified the time and location of two videos by matching structures, debris and benches, and reported that four people died, including al-Dalou and his mother, Alaa. The Israeli military said it had precisely struck militants operating in a Hamas command and control centre beside the hospital, believed the subsequent blaze was probably caused by secondary explosions and was reviewing the incident. Hamas denied that militants were present. Reuters heard a series of smaller explosions in one video; a medic attributed them to cooking gas canisters, which the agency could not independently confirm. Reuters’ verified account preserves both the visual verification and the competing explanations.

The United Nations humanitarian office said the tents were in an area to which people from northern Gaza had been instructed to relocate, that at least four people were burned to death and that scores, including women and children, suffered severe burns. “There really is no safe place in Gaza for people to go,” acting humanitarian chief Joyce Msuya said in an OCHA statement issued on the day of the strike.

Before the ICC, the footage could help establish civilian harm, location, foreseeability of fire in a dense displacement camp and the consequences of striking near a hospital. It does not by itself reveal the intelligence used to select the target, the expected civilian toll, the weapon settings or whether fighters were present. Those questions are central to any prosecution based on intentionally attacking civilians, disproportionality or precautions. Before the ICJ, the fact that displaced families were burned in an area to which they had been directed could form part of the evidence about serious bodily or mental harm and conditions of life, but the court would still need to assess the event within an attributed state policy and the broader evidence of intent.

4. Fire on starving Palestinians waiting for flour

Warning: the linked records contain gunfire, bodies and seriously wounded people at food collection routes.

The archive preserves not one “flour massacre” video but a sequence of attacks and panicked gatherings around food deliveries in northern Gaza. A 19 February 2024 recording from the Al-Kuwaiti roundabout includes a woman shouting, “We are coming to get flour and we will die.” Its notes link the clip to an OCHA report that five Palestinians were allegedly killed when people waiting for aid were shot by Israeli quadcopters. A separate archived montage and incident record collects footage associated with the 29 February disaster on Al-Rashid Street, where the Gaza health authorities reported at least 118 people killed and 760 injured as crowds gathered around food trucks.

The factual dispute over 29 February is important. Palestinian witnesses said Israeli forces opened fire on hungry civilians. Israel said its troops fired warning shots and then at people it considered a threat near a military position, while many casualties resulted from a stampede and people being run over by trucks. Hospital officials reported treating large numbers of gunshot wounds. Associated Press reported the competing accounts, while United Nations experts called for an end to what they described as a campaign of starvation and cited at least 112 deaths.

For the ICC, this cluster is unusually important because the warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant include the alleged war crime of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. Recordings of people repeatedly risking death for flour can help demonstrate the material deprivation, the foreseeability of civilian desperation and attacks on people trying to obtain aid. To prove individual criminal responsibility, prosecutors would still have to connect the conditions and shootings to specific decisions, policies and accused persons. For the ICJ, the same material may be relevant to Article II(c) of the Genocide Convention, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, and to Israel’s compliance with provisional measures requiring humanitarian assistance. The decisive questions remain whether the deprivation and violence are attributable to the state and accompanied by the required intent.

5. Children wasting from hunger and the testimony of their parents

Warning: the linked video shows a severely malnourished child and a parent describing the family’s living conditions.

A 42-second Evidence Task video recorded in June 2024 shows Soad al-Qanou with her son Amjad, who is described as suffering from malnutrition. “There is no food, no drink, there’s a siege and destruction everywhere,” she says in the archived record. Elsewhere the gallery contains images of infants and children reported to have died of malnutrition, videos of skeletal patients in hospital beds, and interviews with doctors describing the absence of therapeutic food, formula and medicines.

These images are less useful if treated as anonymous symbols. Their evidentiary value rises when investigators can establish a child’s identity, medical diagnosis, weight history, place of residence, access to food and treatment, crossing and shipment data, and the decisions that prevented relief. Properly connected, they can prove not only that hunger existed but how it was produced and whether it was used deliberately.

The ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant bore criminal responsibility for starvation as a method of warfare and for the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts. The warrants are allegations, not convictions, and Israel contests the Court’s jurisdiction and conclusions. The ICC’s 21 November 2024 decision summary explains the charges. Israel says it facilitates humanitarian assistance, disputes that it has imposed starvation and blames Hamas theft, fighting and failures by aid organisations for distribution problems. Its published account of the war and humanitarian operations states that position.

For the ICJ, medically documented malnutrition can support allegations of killing, serious bodily or mental harm and destructive conditions of life. It cannot alone prove that those conditions were calculated to destroy Palestinians as a protected group. The inferential case would have to combine the physical evidence with official decisions, aid restrictions, warnings received by Israeli authorities, the duration of deprivation, patterns of attack on food and water systems, and statements capable of establishing specific intent.

What the five records could establish, and what they cannot

Evidentiary cluster	Strongest potential use before the ICJ	Strongest potential use before the ICC	What is still needed
Rafah medics’ phone videos	Pattern affecting protected medical and humanitarian systems and the survival of the population	Attack on protected personnel, murder, possible concealment, and command responsibility	Camera originals, metadata, ballistics, shooter and commander identification, full operational orders
Golani commander briefing	Possible evidence of state or military intent when combined with policy and conduct across many incidents	Rules of engagement, knowledge, ordering and superior responsibility	Full recording, verified translation, speaker identity, date, location, written orders and link to charged acts
Al-Aqsa camp fire	Serious bodily and mental harm and the safety of designated displacement areas	Civilian harm, proportionality, precautions and target selection	Strike file, intelligence, munition data, expected casualty analysis and proof of who was present
Aid-seeker shootings and flour convoys	Conditions of life, deprivation of aid and compliance with provisional measures	Starvation, murder, persecution and attacks on civilians	Complete footage, medical and autopsy records, troop locations, fire logs, convoy records and decision-maker linkage
Malnourished children and parent testimony	Killing, serious harm and destructive conditions of life	Consequences and knowledge relevant to the alleged starvation policy	Medical files, identity and location evidence, aid and crossing data, causal analysis and proof of individual responsibility

The ICJ and ICC would use these materials differently. South Africa’s ICJ case concerns whether Israel, as a state, has violated the Genocide Convention. It requires proof of prohibited acts and, for genocide itself, an intent to destroy a protected group in whole or in substantial part. The ICC case concerns whether named individuals are criminally responsible for particular crimes within the Court’s jurisdiction. A video can therefore be powerful at one court and peripheral at the other. Neither tribunal determines lawfulness by counting disturbing images; each asks whether the material is authentic, relevant, attributable and connected to the required legal elements.

The race to save evidence before it disappears

The archive exists because social media is both indispensable and unreliable. Mobile telephones and online platforms have allowed people inside Gaza to publish a near continuous record despite Israel’s restrictions on independent international media access. Yet those platforms were designed to maximise engagement, not to preserve evidence securely for decades.

Accounts can be suspended, posts removed, passwords lost and files compressed until important metadata disappears. Graphic material may be deleted automatically. A journalist’s death can leave an account inaccessible to relatives and colleagues. Internet blackouts, damaged devices and the destruction of homes or newsrooms can eliminate local copies before they are transferred elsewhere.

The problem extends far beyond Gaza. The Berkeley Human Rights Center describes social media companies as accidental custodians of material that may have evidentiary value, even though they lack the incentive or infrastructure to preserve it indefinitely. The centre warns that international accountability bodies often cannot compel platforms to retain and disclose relevant posts quickly enough, allowing potentially important records to be permanently destroyed. Its work on preserving social media evidence of mass atrocities explains why independent archives have become increasingly important.

There is also documented evidence of disproportionate suppression of Palestinian content. Human Rights Watch examined 1,050 cases of takedowns and other restrictions on Instagram and Facebook during October and November 2023. It found that 1,049 involved peaceful content supporting Palestine, including posts about human rights abuses, while cautioning that its sample did not measure the total distribution of censorship across every viewpoint. The organisation identified removals, account suspensions, feature restrictions and sharp reductions in visibility. Human Rights Watch’s report on Meta described the pattern as systemic and global.

Meta’s own Oversight Board also overturned the removal of a graphic Instagram video showing the aftermath of a strike near Al Shifa Hospital. The Board concluded that such material could have substantial public interest when used to inform people about human suffering or possible abuses. The case illustrated the central contradiction: the same images that platforms may remove because they are disturbing can be essential to journalism, accountability and the historical record. The Oversight Board’s Al Shifa decision records how automated systems removed the post before it was restored.

The danger is compounded by the killing of Palestinian journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists’ continuously updated count recorded at least 207 Palestinian journalists and media workers killed in Gaza by June 2026 and described the period as the deadliest it had documented since it began collecting such data in 1992. CPJ also stresses the extreme difficulty of verification amid destroyed communications infrastructure, displacement and the continuing exclusion of independent foreign reporters. CPJ’s casualty database and methodology provide the latest confirmed figures.

Archive Genocide therefore preserves not only images of atrocities but the work of a press corps that has itself been devastated. When it copies a reporter’s account, it may be saving the only remaining public sequence of that person’s final months.

An archive designed to survive a takedown

Archive Genocide’s most distinctive feature is not the public gallery but its architecture of survival. The organisers are attempting to prevent the record from depending on a single company, server or country.

The curated media collection is distributed through BitTorrent, which allows anyone holding the files to share pieces of them with others. The raw volumes are mirrored by Distributed Denial of Secrets. The website’s front end, server software and gallery metadata have been released under an MIT open source licence so that independent users can construct their own mirrors. The project maintains three declared official domains, archivegenocide.com, archivegenocide.org and archivegenocide.is, as well as a Tor service intended for people facing censorship or surveillance.

Official releases are accompanied by SHA 256 checksums and signatures produced with a project GPG key. In practical terms, these tools allow a user to test whether a downloaded archive is identical to the version released by the organisers. If a file is altered after release, its cryptographic hash will no longer match. The verification guide publishes the signing key fingerprint and explains how to authenticate the torrent files, while the project’s open source mirror code allows copies of the gallery to operate independently.

This approach addresses one form of trust while leaving another unresolved. Cryptographic verification can prove that a mirror has not changed the organisers’ release. It cannot prove that the original video was filmed where the caption claims, that the date is correct, that the footage has not been edited before collection, or that a particular military force was responsible for what it shows.

The project’s own technical documentation effectively acknowledges this distinction by explaining a chain of trust from its signing key to the torrent and then to the downloaded files. That is a chain of custody for the published package, not a complete chain of custody from the camera to a courtroom.

Preservation is not the same as proof

The distinction is crucial because the website repeatedly uses words such as “verified,” “evidence,” “war crimes” and “genocide.” Many incidents in Gaza have been independently investigated and documented as serious violations. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in November 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant, alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare. The warrants do not amount to convictions, and the defendants contest the allegations. The ICC’s Palestine case page records the warrants and proceedings.

Human Rights Watch found that Hamas led armed groups also committed numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity during the attacks of 7 October 2023, including murder and hostage taking. Preserving evidence must apply to violations by every party, even though Archive Genocide’s stated mandate is the documentation of Israeli conduct in Gaza and the West Bank. Human Rights Watch’s investigation of the 7 October attacks sets out those findings.

For any individual item, however, the label “war crime” is a legal conclusion, not merely a visual description. Establishing one may require evidence of the target, expected military advantage, precautions, proportionality, weapon used, command decisions and the attacker’s knowledge at the time. A video of a devastated home can be compelling evidence of the result, but it may not answer all those questions by itself.

The United Nations’ Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations was developed precisely because online material requires disciplined handling. Investigators are expected to preserve originals, document collection methods, record metadata, establish provenance, test alternative explanations, geolocate and chronolocate content, seek corroboration, assess possible manipulation and protect witnesses and victims. The Berkeley Protocol provides an international framework for conducting that work professionally.

Archive Genocide performs parts of this function very well. It preserves original source links when available, records dates and sources, makes downloadable copies, gathers material by location and uses cryptographic tools to protect its published releases from later alteration. Its geolocation page incorporates mapping work from external projects, and its submission system asks contributors to include a date, location and source.

Important questions nevertheless remain unanswered publicly. The site does not yet provide a comprehensive methodology explaining how each file is authenticated, how duplicate or conflicting captions are resolved, whether original metadata is retained for every item, how edited compilations are distinguished from camera originals, how investigators document their decisions, or how consent, dignity and privacy are assessed before graphic images of victims are republished.

These gaps do not make the archive worthless. They define the difference between a preservation repository and a fully forensic evidentiary database. A mature version of the project would benefit from publishing verification grades for individual items, a transparent corrections log, clearer provenance fields, ethical rules for images of children and identifiable dead people, and a detailed methodology aligned with the Berkeley Protocol.

The meaning of the word genocide

The archive does not adopt neutral terminology. Its name and editorial descriptions identify Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocide. That description is no longer confined to campaign groups or individual scholars, although the final legal determination in South Africa’s case against Israel remains for the International Court of Justice.

In September 2025, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israeli authorities and forces had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Amnesty International reached the same conclusion in December 2024. Human Rights Watch found that Israel’s deliberate deprivation of water amounted to the crime against humanity of extermination and acts of genocide, while stating that the broader crime of genocide requires proof of genocidal intent. The UN Commission’s finding, Amnesty International’s report and Human Rights Watch’s water investigation set out the respective analyses.

Israel rejects the genocide accusation. It argues that its war is directed against Hamas following the 7 October attacks, that civilian deaths are not evidence of an intent to destroy Palestinians as a group, and that the charge distorts the Genocide Convention. Israel has also disputed findings by international organisations and maintains that it seeks to comply with international humanitarian law. Israel’s published response to the genocide allegation presents the government’s position.

The ICJ has issued binding provisional measures ordering Israel to prevent acts prohibited by the Genocide Convention and to facilitate humanitarian assistance, but provisional measures are not a final judgment that genocide has occurred. The merits case remains the forum in which the state responsibility allegation must ultimately be decided. The ICJ case record contains the orders and continuing proceedings.

This legal context strengthens the importance of preservation while also imposing a responsibility on the archive to distinguish accusation, documentation, verified fact and judicial finding. Its title is an editorial position. Its files must still be evaluated incident by incident.

Restoring names to the dead

Alongside the footage, the website contains a memorial database listing 60,198 identified Palestinians reported killed in Gaza. The records are drawn from Gaza Ministry of Health releases compiled into accessible datasets by Tech for Palestine. Users can search names or download the list in JSON and CSV formats.

The memorial is powerful because it replaces an abstract total with individual identities. Names, dates of birth and ages establish that a casualty figure represents infants, children, parents, grandparents, doctors, teachers, shopkeepers, journalists and entire family networks. The list also demonstrates the limits of any frozen archive. Tech for Palestine’s own live dataset had expanded to 72,835 identified names, with information available through 7 May 2026, by the time this article was researched. Archive Genocide’s memorial was therefore preserving an earlier snapshot rather than the most recent list. Archive Genocide’s memorial and Tech for Palestine’s current dataset make that difference visible.

The named lists are themselves an undercount of the human toll. People remain missing beneath rubble, some bodies cannot be identified, and the destruction of hospitals, civil registries, communications networks and entire families makes documentation exceptionally difficult. There are also indirect deaths caused by hunger, disease, untreated injuries and the collapse of healthcare that a list of directly recorded fatalities may not capture.

A transparent archive should therefore date every casualty dataset prominently and explain whether it is a current feed, a historical release or a locally imported copy. The difference between 60,198 and 72,835 is not a minor technical issue. It represents thousands of people whose names have been added to the record since the archived version was created.

The ethical burden of permanent memory

Making graphic evidence permanent creates ethical duties as well as technical challenges. Images of the dead can expose atrocities and counter denial, but they can also strip victims of dignity, traumatise relatives, endanger survivors or circulate without the consent of the people depicted. A decentralised torrent cannot easily honour a later request from a family to remove an image. Once hundreds of complete copies exist, deletion becomes practically impossible.

The project’s warning screen is a responsible starting point, but the archive would benefit from a fuller public ethics policy. Such a policy could explain when faces are obscured, how the interests of children are protected, how relatives can request contextual corrections, when public interest overrides privacy and whether especially sensitive material should be restricted to accredited investigators rather than made universally downloadable.

The anonymity of the organisers is understandable in a politically charged and potentially dangerous field. It may protect researchers and sources. It also makes external accountability more difficult. Visitors cannot readily assess the team’s expertise, funding, governance, political affiliations or procedures for correcting mistakes. The archive asks users to trust its curation while correctly telling them not to trust an unverified mirror. Greater methodological transparency could reduce that tension without requiring researchers to expose their identities.

A permanent witness, if the record is handled carefully

Archive Genocide is not a court, and its files are not verdicts. It is a preservation project built in response to an extraordinary crisis of violence, access and memory. Its achievement is to collect a huge body of material, make much of it searchable, preserve names and sources, and distribute copies in a form designed to outlive a conventional website.

Its most important contribution may be temporal. News reporting moves quickly, social media moves faster, and both can reduce an atrocity to a brief sequence of images before the next event takes its place. An archive arrests that disappearance. It allows a clip to be revisited months or years later, compared with other evidence, linked to a name, placed on a map and tested against official claims.

The project’s value will ultimately depend on whether preservation is followed by patient verification. The strongest future for Archive Genocide would combine its decentralised engineering with transparent forensic standards, careful corrections, protection for victims and clear distinctions between raw material, corroborated incidents and legal conclusions.

Even in its unfinished form, however, the archive poses a profound challenge to erasure. Servers can be seized, accounts removed and links broken, but a record copied across thousands of machines is much harder to destroy. The horror preserved on the site should never become spectacle. Handled responsibly, it can remain testimony: a record created by people who filmed what was happening around them, and maintained so that no government, platform or future historian can credibly claim that there was nothing to see.