It usually began with the engineers walking the length of a street, threading charges through house after house along a whole block. Then the countdown, and then the block went down together, a single rolling wall of dust where a neighborhood had stood, and over the noise the men who had wired it could be heard cheering. The soldier holding the phone kept it steady on the collapse, because he was proud of it, and he posted it when it was done. This was not one street or one crew. The same scene plays across Gaza in thousands of clips, filmed by unit after unit who set the charges and whooped as the buildings fell, some of them dedicating the blast to a dead comrade or a holiday back home. The deliberate leveling of whole residential blocks, which the men who set the charges filmed and cheered as it happened, is among the most common scenes in the entire archive of soldier video.
The law speaks directly to this. The Fourth Geneva Convention forbids an occupying army from destroying civilian property unless a specific military operation leaves it no choice, and the extensive, wanton destruction of property is listed among the grave breaches that count as war crimes. A victory video is the clearest possible proof that the test was not met. A building demolished out of genuine operational need is not an occasion for celebration. The cheer on the soundtrack is the admission. The block came down because the army could and wished to, and someone filmed it to be enjoyed later.
The prisoners were the other great subject. Across the strip soldiers filmed the men they had rounded up, stripped to their underwear and blindfolded, made to kneel in long rows, and they filmed themselves standing over them. One case stands for the pattern. In December 2023 a soldier named Yossi Gamzoo posted footage of a Palestinian stripped and bound, bleeding, under interrogation at Gaza College, then marched barefoot through the street, and a second clip of hundreds of men herded into Yarmouk stadium, many in their underwear, some blindfolded, kneeling in rows, three women among them on their knees behind a goal. Another soldier, later identified as Ilya Blank, set a montage of blindfolded detainees crammed into a pickup truck, a comrade grinning and raising a thumb, to an Israeli rap track. These were not stray cruelties. The Geneva Conventions require that people in custody be treated humanely and protected from public curiosity, and the lawyers who examined the footage for the BBC found that it breached those rules. The soldiers filmed the breaches under their own names, for an audience they trusted to cheer.
Some of the worst was never meant to be seen, and surfaced only because someone inside leaked it. On August 6, 2024, Israel’s Channel 12 broadcast surveillance video from Sde Teiman, a military camp in southern Israel holding Palestinians taken from Gaza. It showed soldiers walking a detainee into a corner and closing around him with riot shields, so that what they did to him happened just out of the camera’s reach. The army’s own indictment spelled out what the shields had hidden. The soldiers set upon the man with severe sexual violence and drove a sharp object into him that penetrated near his rectum and tore the rectal wall. The same assault left him with cracked ribs and a punctured lung. The broadcast called it a rape; the charges that came stopped at aggravated assault.
One kind of footage the soldiers made themselves and published as a trophy. The other had to be dragged into the open against them. Both ended up in the same place, beyond the reach of the men who appeared in it and the state that sent them, as evidence in front of courts and investigators far from the ground where it was filmed.
Every state that has ever set out to erase the evidence of its crimes has begun from the same position. It held the record, and the work was to destroy or bury it before anyone on the outside could see. My last article followed Britain doing exactly that with the paper archive of its empire. Israel’s war in Gaza has produced something that method was never built for. The evidence was not held by the state and then concealed. It was made by the perpetrators and broadcast by them, in real time, before any authority had the chance to decide what the public would be allowed to know. The confession arrived ahead of the cover-up, and the cover-up has been running backwards ever since.
Outside investigators turned the flood of posts into a map. The Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi spent months identifying soldiers and their units from what they had published, among them a sniper team he traced after one of its members uploaded a video that recounted the unit’s operations in Gaza City and showed unarmed people being shot. Tirawi gathered post after post of soldiers displaying the lingerie and the mannequins of the women whose homes they had taken. Al Jazeera’s investigative unit, pulling the wider record together, built a database of more than two and a half thousand accounts belonging to serving soldiers.
The posts did more than embarrass. They turned into evidence that followed the men who made them. A Belgian group, the Hind Rajab Foundation, began converting soldiers’ own social media into criminal complaints, identifying individuals from what they had published and lodging cases wherever those individuals travelled. Within a year the group had filed around fifty complaints in courts around the world and handed the International Criminal Court the names of a thousand soldiers, backed by thousands of items of footage and posts. In Brazil a judge issued an arrest warrant against one soldier, who evaded it only by slipping across the border into Argentina. A complaint in Portugal rested on a sniper’s own online boast of four bullets and no misses. The group built a further case in Belgium against a dual-national member of the sniper team, around the siege of a Gaza hospital. The Israeli military answered by warning its soldiers to stop posting the details of their service and by urging some of them to leave the countries they were visiting before they could be seized.
The audience was wider than any poster had reckoned on. When South Africa brought its genocide case against Israel to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, its lawyers played the soldiers’ own videos in the courtroom and read out the statements the soldiers had made on camera, offering them as evidence of intent. The court found the Palestinians’ claim to protection from genocide plausible and handed down binding provisional measures. One of them ordered Israel to take effective steps to prevent the destruction and to ensure the preservation of evidence bearing on the allegations. A later order went further and required Israel to let United Nations investigators into Gaza to secure that evidence. A court in The Hague was reduced to instructing a state not to destroy the proof of what it stood accused of, in the same weeks that the proof was being uploaded by the state’s own soldiers.
From that point the machinery of erasure ran in reverse. A government that in an earlier age would have controlled the only copies now had to chase material that was already public and already on other people’s drives. In February 2024 the chief of the general staff, Herzi Halevi, wrote to his commanders telling soldiers not to loot and not to shoot revenge videos, and in a separate message assured his own ranks that the army was not on a killing spree and was not committing genocide. Soldiers who had posted footage of their demolitions were told to take it down. The stated worry, in the words of the military’s own people, was that the clips could feed the cases building at the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. By the middle of 2025 the chief military censor had issued an order restricting what could be posted about strikes at all. The instruction reaching the soldier had less to do with the enemy in front of him than with the camera in his hand.
The pursuit did not stop at the soldiers’ phones. By 2026 the army’s chief of staff had instructed the military’s lawyers to examine legal action against the makers of a prize-winning documentary NAZA in which soldiers described the deliberate mass killing of civilians in Gaza, and the prime minister called the film shocking. The effort had travelled from deleting a soldier’s post to pursuing the people who gathered such material into an account the world might watch.
The deleting did not fall evenly. While the soldiers’ trophies moved freely, the documentation coming from the other side was being swept off the same platforms. Across October and November 2023, Human Rights Watch logged more than a thousand removals and suppressions of Palestinian content on Instagram and Facebook. Of the 1,050 cases it examined, 1,049 concerned peaceful content in support of Palestinians, and a single one supported Israel. The suppression took six recurring forms, from outright removal and account suspension to shadow-banning and the blocking of live video, and it reached even posts that carried clear news value. Human Rights Watch traced the pattern to automated moderation and to government pressure on what the company agreed to pull, among it referrals from Israel’s state cyber unit. The throttling grew heavy enough that Palestinians and their supporters took to misspelling the word Gaza, or standing in a watermelon for the banned flag, to get a post past the filters. A United States senator wrote to the company about it. Meta’s own commissioned review had already found, the year before the war, that its moderation was damaging Palestinian rights. For a stretch of the fighting the record of the people being bombed was harder to keep online than the footage shot by the people bombing them.
Beneath the new problem, the older kinds of erasure went on as they always have. The physical record of Gaza was being destroyed with everything else. Early in the war an airstrike flattened the Central Archives of Gaza City, which held about a hundred and fifty years of the territory’s history in some 110,000 documents and photographs. The library of the Islamic University of Gaza had already been leveled in the war’s second week, and the public library of Gaza City, with its ten thousand volumes, went soon after. United Nations experts put a word to the wider assault on schooling, scholasticide, the deliberate destruction of a people’s means of knowing itself. By their count more than 80% of Gaza’s schools were damaged or destroyed. Among the dead were 5,479 students and 261 of their teachers, along with ninety-five university professors. The last functioning university was demolished in January 2024, after the army had held it for seventy days as a base and a detention site. One survey of the cultural wreckage counted at least twenty-two of Gaza’s archives and libraries destroyed or damaged in the first three months alone.
The people who keep the record were being killed alongside it. By the reckoning of the Committee to Protect Journalists, 2024 was the deadliest year for the press since the group began counting in 1992, with 124 killed, most of them Palestinians in Gaza, and roughly 60% of the global toll laid at Israel’s door. The dead included Hamza Dahdouh, himself a journalist and the son of a journalist, killed in a strike on his car, and Ismail al-Ghoul with his cameraman Rami al-Rifi, killed in a vehicle that carried press markings while both wore vests identifying them as media. Thirty-one of those killed in Gaza were freelancers who had stepped in after their newsrooms were destroyed and most journalists were killed, filling a gap that existed because Israel kept foreign correspondents out except on escorted military trips, a bar that more than fifty of those correspondents signed a letter to protest.
The oldest layer of all reaches back to the founding. For two decades, under a chief who ran it until 2007, a secretive unit of the Israeli defence ministry known by the Hebrew acronym Malmab has been pulling documents out of the state’s own archives, often with no legal authority, and in some cases resealing papers that the military censor had already cleared for release. The historian Benny Morris (whom this author interviewed) found that files he had quoted fifteen years earlier were no longer open to him. The largest archive in the country, the military’s own, sits almost completely sealed. Among the documents withdrawn was an internal report on how Palestinian villages were destroyed in the first months of the 1948 war, a record that cuts against the official account of people who simply chose to leave. The method is the one Britain would know at once, the quiet removal of a document that was already in the open.
Libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard argued that a state survives less by force than by managing what its subjects can be brought to believe about it. The soldiers’ footage took that management out of the state’s hands for a season, and the deleting that has followed has not fully restored it.
What binds these methods together is also what sets this case apart from the British one. Britain had time and a monopoly. It held the only copies, and it had fifty years and a locked building in which to decide what the world would ever see. Israel has had neither of those advantages. The decisive evidence in its war was made by its own soldiers and handed to the internet before any censor could reach it. It was copied to strangers’ drives within hours and read into the record of a court before any order to delete it could take hold. A government can burn an archive, because an archive sits in one place. Unpublishing a confession that several thousand men have already made to the world is a harder thing by far. The attempt goes on regardless, and the attempt, as in every case that came before it, is its own kind of admission.
