How Volunteers Map and Verify Footage of War Crimes in Gaza

The primary motivation came from the fact that we could not believe something like this was happening and actively being covered up by the media, and we realized early on that Israel had both the network and control over mainstream media groups to actually bury it.

So we made it our singular mission to make sure that could not happen, and to get as many people as possible to see the raw war crimes footage.

Israel's war on Gaza has been described as the first live-streamed genocide, with footage of war crimes and utter destruction flooding social media since October 2023. Now, new technology is taking that documentation a step further, mapping videos of Israeli war crimes to the exact sites and locations across Gaza where they

were filmed. Meet Archive Genocide, the team behind the technology, who has just created their interactive node map on a fully functioning website, named archivegenocide.com.

The project began back in early 2024 with only around two to four volunteers.

In the beginning, it was extremely difficult work, split among very few of us. A lot of the footage was erased and never recovered because we were limited by the number on our team. As time went on and we gained more exposure, more people joined in and we were able to split the load

across a much larger group. This meant that we could monitor and catch a wider range of sources. We use Telegram as the primary method to submit footage, where volunteers can send us what they find, but we also download entire journalist profiles as a backup.

Once we had collected a sizable amount of footage, we began submitting to the ICC, Hind Rajab Foundation, and the South African legal team for their genocide case at the ICJ.

The platform maps more than 35,400 elements of documented war crimes as individual points in video or photo form. Some are pinned to the exact location, while others are placed more approximately at the level of block, neighborhood, camp, or building named in the original caption.

Our verification happens in two stages. The first comes during the collection phase, where we verify the footage being submitted to us and the journalists themselves, who they are, if others in Gaza know them, if their content is legitimate and matches reports coming out of Gaza. We established which journalists were uploading the

most footage and focused on them first. We try to geolocate where each event happens based on the footage or descriptions, and we look at witness testimony and footage of the aftermath to help establish the timeline of events and gather details of what happened. The second verification happens after the collecting

phase, when it is time to import to the archive.

We check for duplicated footage, unrelated footage, or any footage from outside the timeframe of this genocide.

We use standard verification methods, video metadata, multiple angles, and we look for multiple sources for the same event too to corroborate. Our geolocation map mainly draws on place names in the original captions, reporting that identifies specific buildings or streets, and published geolocations by independent researchers like

Genocide.live and Abu Location on Twitter.

Our map uses pre-war satellite imagery and historical imagery alongside newer views, because a building visible in the original footage may no longer exist today. The node map is a separate project that serves a complementary purpose on top of the geolocation map.

It connects the footage with related events, places, people, leads, and sources, so researchers can follow those connections back to the original material.

Selecting an event opens it within a network view, showing related footage, links between events, and leads for further investigation.

The map also has a built-in AI assistant, Iris.

Users can ask for a place, type of attack, date, or person, and the map filters to show only matching footage.

Iris can also explain what a user is looking at.

Other filters allow users to set a date range, play the footage back week by week, and isolate specific facilities, such as hospitals, schools, and mosques. A separate toggle overlays the UN Satellite Centre's survey of roughly 198,000 damaged or destroyed structures as of October 2025.

We have also developed a tool that monitors journalists' accounts and notifies us whatever a new upload is made.

This allows us to secure the footage before social media platforms can detect and delete them, and this has made things easier and more efficient. It also gave us a good bird's-eye view of events in Gaza.

As footage continues to emerge from Gaza, Archive Genocide is working to ensure it is not lost, erased, or forgotten.

By mapping each piece of evidence to places where events unfolded, the project aims to preserve a record of the destruction and support efforts to hold those responsible to account.