The Take Why is evidence of Israel's war crimes in Gaza disappearing?
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Jan 30, 2026 Lila Hassan, an investigative journalist who documents conflict and human rights abuses, explores how Gaza’s visual records are being lost. She discusses local archivists risking everything to save footage. She examines social platforms’ removals, technical threats like bit rot and AI, and the hurdles of turning videos into legal evidence.
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Mobile Archive In A Car Trunk
- Saliman Hidji carried multiple hard drives and created dummy Google links while fleeing Gaza to preserve his reporting.
- He distributed copies and hid drives in private plots to keep his archive alive despite repeated displacements.
Social Platforms Are Fragile Archives
- Social platforms act as accidental archives but have no mandate to preserve content.
- Automated moderation and guidelines often remove graphic or politicized material, causing permanent loss.
Urgency Of Active Digital Preservation
- Digital files degrade and become unusable without active maintenance due to bit rot and changing formats.
- The volume of daily uploads from Gaza outpaces human capacity to keep files updated and verified.