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In January, photojournalist Mohamed El-Reefi posted a carousel of videos to his Instagram from Gaza. In one, crowds of people move along a wet, sandy strip of land, with the ocean on one side and destroyed buildings on the other. Another shows a man in a large crowd trying to collect the remains of flour that has spilled onto the sandy ground.
Over the past six months, tens of thousands of people have been killed and many more injured. The work of Palestinian journalists has captured life when it threatens to become overwhelmed by death. Their effort has been especially vital given that external news organizations have struggled to keep reporters on the ground. On the rare occasion outside journalists could enter Gaza, it was with the approval and accompaniment of the Israeli army.
And it has been a deadly conflict for reporters. Though the numbers are disputed, and arguments rage about the definition of a journalist, the consensus of estimates is that about a hundred journalists and media workers have been killed. El-Reefi is one of them. In March, while trying to procure flour for his own family, El-Reefi was reportedly hit by Israeli gunfire and died of his injuries.
His death puts his body of work at risk. Accounts like his, said Philip Proudfoot, an anthropologist researcher focused on Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, risk becoming marked as inactive and removed, “or it can be algorithm changes that identify a deceased journalist’s content as graphic.”
That is why Proudfoot and others have started a project called Witness Vault, which is working to preserve the social media accounts of journalists and others in situations like El-Reefi’s. It uses automatic scraping tools to comb through social media platforms and stores footage and images on data drives that are not subject to the vagaries of online content.
The Witness Vault team wants to offer backup services for even non-journalists to preserve the footage from their phones. Once videos, photos, and accounts are secured onto multiple servers, Witness Vault plans to make the content available on an interface that can be accessed by researchers.
The Witness Vault is an offshoot of the group’s main project, The Accountability Archive, which is a crowdsourced collection of broader materials related to Gaza. The Archive runs on modest donations––around £4,000—and has sustained itself with a nimble group and low costs. Developers and website designers have volunteered services, and the automatic scraping tools used to collect and store the data are relatively cheap to implement.
The group has hired an analyst to help manage the project. They hope it can be an example for how to archive the critical information on our phones or social media accounts. “All of these tools that we are developing have applications beyond Gaza,” Proudfoot said. “These are methods of crowdsourcing evidence in a time of data deliberation that can be useful in all conflicts.”
The initiative follows in the steps of efforts like the Palestinian Museum in the West Bank, where the necessity to archive is not new. The museum has been collecting and digitizing newspapers covering several decades, making them accessible online through its digital archive. “It’s something that occupies every part of society, because Palestinian geographies are scattered, split by checkpoints, military-only roads, or settler-only roads,” said Nabil Barham, the research and knowledge programs manager at the Palestinian Museum.
“We found huge collections in the homes of people who just had an obsession with collecting every bit of news that came out of Palestine,” Barham said. Large contributions came from ordinary citizens. In some cases, people devoted whole rooms. One private score was a decades-spanning collection of Attaliah, a Palestinian weekly newspaper published out of Jerusalem. “People had a fear that this history would be destroyed,” Barham added.
It’s no longer an academic consideration. Since the war began last October, all twelve of Gaza’s universities, including their libraries, have been destroyed or damaged beyond use. The only safe place may be hard drives far away.
The Witness Vault team also hopes that their work can be used by anyone who investigates the conflict in the future. The Reckoning Project, an initiative by war correspondents and Ukrainian journalists to document Russia’s war on Ukraine, has made similar efforts to preserve firsthand accounts.
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