Symposium on Forensic and Counter-Forensic Approaches to International Law: The Production of Visible Evidence in the Gaza Genocide

[Laliv Melamed is a professor of digital film cultures at Goethe University, Frankfurt]

On the evening of 27 October 2023, the IDF spokesperson released a CGI (computer-generated imaging) model of Al Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex. The model draws on what is by now a familiar arsenal of digital forensics. It is based on data collected from aerial imagery, maps, and military intel. Disseminated to international media, the CGI model presented the hospital’s underground facilities as the location of Hamas’ headquarters. In mid-November, three weeks after the release of the evidence, the hospital will be besieged and raided for the first time. Another raid will take place March 2024. Both raids were followed by videographed displays of evidence, combining visual data assembled from multiple cameras, from televised reportage taken by the IDF spokesperson unit to the hospital CCTV, combatants’ head cameras, satellite and drone imagery.  Symptomatic of the contemporary media landscape, these reports traveled through social media in a polarizing manner, at times the very same set of images cited to endorse or repudiate, reaffirm or ridicule, Israel claims for Hamas use of the hospital. Such polarizing effect of social media, as well as the coalescing of traditional media forms with advanced militarized optics, such as satellite and drones, are both common tropes when it comes to media and war. The binary distribution of life and death that underlies the IDF claims, sanctioning death for Palestinians for the sake of the alleged defense of Israelis, is constitutive of the structure of Israeli aggression and is part of what Achille Mbembe construes as the necropolitical nature of Israeli sovereignty. What deserves further attention, however, is the use and abuse of evidence in Israel genocidal attack over Gaza, like the attack and ultimate destruction of Al Shifa hospital. Carefully assembled, heavily narrated by the IDF spokesperson, evidence is used here as a means of legitimacy and legibility of war. Such evidential display, I argue, turns forensics into a theatre of forensics.

Mobilizing a wide range of digital tools, such as open-source investigative tools (OSNIT), computer generated imagery, satellite imaging, and AI powered image analysis, the current genocide in Gaza and the West Bank reflects the ultimate transformation of forensics into a mass mediated form, circulating beyond its confined realms of law and expert knowledge. The emergence of digital evidence—that goes back to the early 1990s with the entrance of digital video into humanitarian work—and its current high-tech moment of data search and analysis platforms, have brought with it the promise of access and accountability. Yet, despite the plethora of visual (and other) records and the advance of imaging technologies, popular forensics in the current events of extreme violence have brought about a conundrum of evidence. Forensic and counter forensic reports, within the realm of public opinion and international law, rather than reinforcing accountability, have become means of legal and moral omission. To paraphrase Francesca Albanese, digital forensics are used as “forensic camouflage,” serving the obstruction of evidence, the denial of harm and the circumvention of the material structures of violence and intent.

One aspect to consider is the way Open-Source Intelligence, or OSINT, is ubiquitously used as a mass media form during the genocide (for example, in multiple investigations into the blast in Al Ahli hospital, on October 17^th, 2023, conducted by CNN, BBC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardians, Associated Press, as well as respected independent research bodies such as Bellingcat and Forensic Architecture). OSINT relies on information that is publicly available, from, for instance, social media, public database, or broadcast (news) media. This information is collected and analyzed to identify patterns and assess risk. It is central to the current forensic turn. In the context of humanitarian media, OSINT carries with it a promise of access in places where the very structures of domination and violence include a direct attack on visibility and information. With Israel blocking of international media from accessing Gaza and its constant targeting of journalists, such distant access and analysis became a core part of the production of visible evidence during the genocide.

Heavily based on data flows in the age of digital media, such media, however, by its very technology and routes of circulation, entails frictions. In its process of production, OSINT investigations are highly synthetic process, predicated on assembling, synthesizing, processing and juxtaposing a mass of images and data. This entails gaps and a level of speculation which makes OSINT based evidence subject for reinterpretation and invites immanent suspicion.

OSNIT’s promise of access should be considered in relation to larger historical shifts in media technologies that were celebrated as a democratization of media—no longer relaying on a centralized institutional framework, often sponsored by the state—and technological freedom—the lightness, affordability and user friendliness of digital technologies. As critics of media and humanitarianism have showed, this notion of access was tightly tied to neo-liberal structures and did not necessarily lead to just or accountable political formations. Such democratic and egalitarian notions are not only technologically and politically determined but cater to specific categories of labor and expertise. The freelance journalist, freelance researcher and the outsourced expert are all casted by evidence-based media as free agents in a free media market. As much as the independence of those from traditional media institutions and its ideological ties is important, aspects such as job security, professional and ethical standards, or privatization of knowledge intervene in the production of evidence.

Open sourced, the general availability of visual data and the software that analyzes and models accordingly, demands enhanced verification and corroboration. Expertise becomes both core and excessive to popular forensics. On the one hand, the centrality of the expert to the corroboration of forensic evidence is so prominent that it sometimes shifts the center of attention. Verification of the expertise, and even of the expert themselves, might take precedence over the evidence, or even compromise it. On the other hand, software availability and automation loosen aspects of expertise. The aforementioned reports followed a similar aesthetic, including 3D simulation models, aerial photography and the semiotics of image analysis: arrows, circles, or color highlighting. High-Tech visions of truth have permeated mass media, at times detached from the form of expertise and analysis that OSINT investigations demand. In such a case, evidence is a mode of appearance rather than a legal or moral institute.

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In the early morning of 29 February 2024, eighteen aid trucks made their way across Haroun Al Rasheed Street in the west of Gaza city. Thousands of civilians started approaching the trucks, hoping to gain access to food, when Israeli forces opened fire. 115 people were killed and more than 700 wounded in what has become known as the flour massacre. In response to international criticism and calls to investigate the event, Israel released an infra-red footage that documented the event from above. The footage was brought to support the IDF spokesperson’s claim that the crowds intended to loot the convoy, that the majority of deaths were caused by the chaos on the site, and that Israeli tanks, there to secure the convoy, shot only warning shoots, after feeling threatened by the crowds. The three-minute video shows a blurry mass gathering around the tracks. Israeli tanks are visible on the side of the convoy. Due to the altitude and infrared, the crowds look like dark dots swarming towards the track.

Beyond the coded portrayal, the footage is visibly cut and edited. When international media bodies appealed to the IDF to release the full footage, the IDF refused. Here evidence is released strategically by the state in order to obscure rather than expose. Drone images and other military optics claim transparency, logistically embedded in military action, external to culturally structured processes of representation and mediation, and often detached from human agency. But this is an empty gesture of transparency.

Scale, rather than transparency, can help us think about what the footage discloses or, rather, obscures. The look from above, that turns the masses to swarms, is continuous in its technology and logic with means of domination and control. Unsatisfied with the evidence provided by the drone footage, other media bodies, drew on eyewitness testimony and a study of the injuries that caused death. This is a reminder that despite the Israeli blockade of access for international media—what drove international media to adopt a distant forensic approach—Gaza is not invisible, but constantly documented by local journalists, who risk their life by doing so. The look from above allows an analytical gaze, but devalues experience. The prioritizing of operative media sides evidence and its corroboration with the very structure of violence.

Rather than conclusiveness and accountability, evidence produced during the genocide caters to further circumventions and denialism. According to Stephan Tarnowski, deniability is rooted in the divorce of knowledge from acknowledgement, and the suspension of judgement. Tarnowski links deniability with the plausible: if something might happened, it also might not. In their realization of scale, forensic investigations, both by the IDF and media bodies, produce knowledge concurrently with disavowal. They tend to focus on the details, sometimes on the expense of the larger frame: closely examine the size of the crate in the case of Al Ahli, which leaves outside the frame that this is a hospital parking lot; measuring the distance between the tank and the masses, while lacking means to represent that food is scarce and the people gathering at the site are desperate and hungry. Forensics are structured around concrete events, but the enduring infrastructures and logics of violence cannot necessarily be contained within a single event. On the side of the IDF, this detailed examination became a strategy, a pattern of repudiation and the diversion of evidence in ways that make plausible attacks on hospitals, on refugee camps, on food lines, on humanitarian workers. And so, in the IDF theatre of forensics, under the fog of war, due to infrastructural miscalculation, an error or a mistake, Palestinians, time and again, are to blame for their own killing.

More than a year later, massacres in aid sites in Gaza have become a horrifying routine. In June 2025, an IDF officer have told Haaretz journalists that the military use fire to “control the crowds” that gather in aid sites. The evidence, blunt and direct, comes after the fact, comes too late. The genocide entails a temporal friction, where urgency is responded with the too lateness of accountability. While media technology facilitates a livestream of the genocide along with a detailed analysis of its atrocities, available political and legal mechanisms operate on a different temporal scheme. On the other hand, with all of its immediacy and technological assemblages, evidentiary media, have failed to provide direct contact with the violence. Rather than facilitating a forensic trace, it created a mode of camouflage, a theatre of forensics.