I should have drawn attention to these two further, vital resources in my post on Black Friday, Israel’s assault on Rafah during ‘Operation Protective Edge‘.

First, Forensic Architecture‘s wider collaboration with Amnesty International (in association with the Al-Mezan Centre for Human Rights/Palestinian Centre for Human Rights) has produced The Gaza Platform:

The Gaza Platform is an interactive map of attacks by Israeli forces on Gaza between 8 July and 26 August 2014.

It enables its users to explore a vast collection of data, collected on the ground by the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), as well as Amnesty International, during and after the conflict.

Produced through a year-long collaboration between Forensic Architecture and Amnesty International, the Gaza Platform is a new gateway to this precious, first-hand information: it not only gives access to a large quantity of otherwise dispersed data, but helps make sense of it.

The Gaza Platform is the most comprehensive public repository of information about attacks carried out during the 2014 Gaza conflict to date. At the time of its launch on 8 July 2015, it featured over 2,750 individual events, recording the deaths of more than 2,200 people, including 1,800 civilians and 600 children. As a digital interface, it enables access not only to text reports, but also to photos, videos, audio recordings and satellite imagery documenting the war – all in one place.

It is important to note that the Gaza Platform does not provide a complete record of the impact of Israeli attacks during the 2014 conflict. It does not cover every single attack that took place during the conflict, but only those for which a report is available. Therefore, the total number of casualties presented in the Gaza Platform falls short of the one recorded by the UN across the entire conflict.

However, the Gaza Platform does more than provide overall figures and statistics about the conflict. Each death is linked to a specific event, for which all available details and context are given, thus providing the granular details of each individual event recorded. It also helps to reveal trends by making links between dispersed individual events and detecting patterns of attacks across the 50-day time span of the conflict, thereby contributing to an assessment of the conduct of Israeli forces and its conformity or otherwise with the provisions of international humanitarian law (the laws of war). As such, the Gaza Platform is a tool aimed at uncovering the truth about the attacks on Gaza and contributing to accountability efforts for crimes under international law committed by both sides during the 2014 conflict, the third such conflict in six years.

According to Doug Bolton writing in the Independent:

Phillip Luther, the Director of Amnesty International‘s Middle East and North Africa programme, said it “has the potential to expose the systematic nature of Israeli violations committed during the conflict.”

He added: “Our aim it for it to become an invaluable resource for human rights investigators pushing for accountability for violations committed during the conflict.”…

Francesco Sebregondi, the director of the project at Forensic Architecture, said the map “exploits the power of new digital tools to shed light on complex events such as the latest war in Gaza.”

“It enables users to move across scales, from the granular details of each incident to the big picture of the overall conflict, by revealing connections between scattered events.”

I’m not going to link to them, but the hysterical response from apologists for the indiscriminate violence of the Israeli assault on Gaza shows that the Gaza Platform has hit a nerve: as it should.

Incidentally, there’s a short article in today’s Guardian about the ongoing transformation of humanities research: the growth of the ‘digital humanities’,  ‘tech-savvy’ analysis of large data sets, collaborations with non-academic professionals, and a determination to show how ‘research can benefit society’.  The Gaza Platform isn’t mentioned, but it surely exemplifies exactly what the author has in mind.

Second, Max Blumenthal‘s coruscating chronicle of The 51 Day War: ruin and resistance in Gaza, out now from Verso.  As Juan Cole put it, ‘Max Blumenthal audaciously takes in-your-face, on-the-ground journalism into the realm of geopolitics.’  You can find Glenn Greenwald‘s interview with Max at The Intercept here:

What shook me the most was how well I was treated in the rubble. How after interviewing families who would tell me about witnessing their neighbors being destroyed by a missile, that they would beseech me to have lunch with them. I didn’t even know where the lunch would come from. They would chase me down after denouncing my government and insisting that the Obama administration was no better than Netanyahu, and hand me sweets, and tell me that they see a clear difference between the American people and the American government. I mean, that kind of treatment showed me how impeccable the character of these people was, even as they were facing their own immiseration and ruin.

That was kind of deceptive, because I started to adjust, in a weird way, to being in the rubble with these people. Then the bombing started again, and then I had to deal with the terror of night after night of bombings, and naval shelling throughout the day, and drones swooping closely overhead, searching for targets. And I became shell-shocked. So I couldn’t have even imagined going through 51 days of that, especially as a child under the age of seven.

We have to recognize that the Gaza Strip is a ghetto of children. The majority of the people in the Gaza strip are under age 18, and a substantial percentage of those under 18 are under the age of seven, which means they have known nothing in their lives but these three atrocious wars, which have left almost 20 percent of the entire area of the Gaza Strip in ruins.

What’s on those children’s mind? What kind of lives can they have? Can they ever be normal as they go through life without therapy, without relief, without recourse and without justice, with continuous traumatic stress disorder?