The war in Gaza one year later: how open source investigations have helped reveal the costs of war

This week marks the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel by Hamas fighters, who killed 1,200 soldiers and civilians and took more than 200 hostages. The Israeli military response that followed has resulted in the deaths of at least 40,000 in Gaza, most of them civilians, and leveled large swaths of homes, schools, businesses and hospitals. With access  for journalists to facts on the ground both difficult and dangerous, news organizations have relied on the tools of open source investigation (OSI) — everything from satellite imagery to bodycam footage to social media video posts — to investigate the claims and counterclaims on both sides. Their efforts have often pierced the fog of war, but also revealed some of the limitations of OSI when presented with conflicting evidence.

Uncovering how Hamas planned the attack

Hamas’ surprise attack on Oct. 7 revealed a massive failure of Israeli military intelligence. In “Hamas training for raid on Israel revealed,” BBC Arab’s digital forensics team and BBC Verify, a fact-checking unit, used videos posted by Hamas on the messaging service Telegram to show that the group had been holding training exercises in plain sight for three years. The BBC used geolocation techniques to trace where the videos were shot, including one of a mock Israeli village – complete with a fake tank where fighters were shown practicing their assault – less than a half mile from the Eretz border crossing in northern Gaza. Another video, from further south, showed Hamas fighters training to take hostages. The BBC team used similar techniques to locate a total of 14 training sites.

“The clues were out there if you knew where to look,” said BBC team member Abdirahim Saeed in a presentation on their open-source methods. “I know from experience that militant groups tend to post [online], and tend to be more resilient and stable on Telegram rather than mainstream social media sites…. For us, it proved to be a trove of information.”

Analyzing how Hamas’ attack slipped under Israel’s radar

In “How Israel’s Iron Wall Crumbled Under Hamas’ Oct. 7 Attack,” a joint investigation by the Washington Post and Frontline, videos and satellite images were used to show how Hamas exploited Israel’s reliance on technology to mount their assault. Israel’s $1 billion dollar system of walls, remote-controlled machine gun posts and sensors was supposed to deter any attack. The Post analyzed hundreds of videos and photos posted on social media, planning documents and bodycam footage recovered from dead Hamas fighters and Israeli surveillance cameras to show how Hamas blinded Israel’s system of surveillance balloons and reconnaissance towers, cutting off the Israeli military from real-time information in the early hours of the assault.

Documenting mass destruction across Gaza by Israeli forces

“Please, can you help me obtain a recent photo of my residential area in Tall As Sultan to check on our homes?” read the message on X to OSI pioneers Bellingcat. Using OpenStreetMap data, Bellingcat determined that in the questioner’s neighborhood in the east of Rafah, only 224 of 670 buildings remained standing. The Bellingcat investigation by Jake Godin superimposed before-and-after satellite images to powerful effect, showing the destruction of two-thirds of the original buildings in Tall As Sultan.

In “The Gaza Strip before and after Israel’s invasion,” The New York Times combined satellite photos and videos to show the unprecedented scale of the destruction. They, too, used before-and-after images but on a larger scale and with a more reader-friendly scrollytelling technique.

The Guardian’s investigation “How war destroyed Gaza’s neighbourhoods” begins with a composite satellite photo giving an overview of the vast scale of the destruction across Gaza. As the reader scrolls the images zoom in to show the ruins of schools, hospitals, apartment buildings and other critical infrastructure. The Guardian showed their analysis to experts at the United Nations and elsewhere, leading Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, to write, “The utter annihilation of Beit Hanoun and the destruction of al-Zahra and Khan Younis, are evidence that Israeli use of force has made life impossible by making them uninhabitable.”

Reconstructing the deadly aftermath of a successful hostage rescue operation

On June 8, 2023, Israeli forces rescued three hostages from the tunnel where they’d been hidden. While the rescue operation was successful, it quickly escalated into a firefight and a series of deadly airstrikes killing scores of people in one of the bloodiest episodes of the war to that point. The New York Times’ analysis “using satellite images, witness accounts and more than 60 videos,” revealed that the strikes “destroyed or damaged at least 42 buildings. The areas hit included apartment buildings and a crowded market, helping to explain the high death toll.” The Washington Post’s Visual Forensics team combined videos and photos with 3D recreations of the scene to also build a thorough narrative of the day.

The attack on Al-Ahli hospital: getting it wrong, then (maybe) getting it right

As effective as open-source investigative techniques have been in revealing both the broad sweep and hidden patterns of the conflict, the war in Gaza has also shown the ways that disinformation and a rush to judgment can obscure the truth. On the evening of Oct. 17, 2023, a massive explosion hit a courtyard area of the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City where hundreds of civilians gathered seeking safety from Israeli airstrikes. In the aftermath, Israel and Hamas blamed each other by pointing to conflicting video evidence.

Initial reports claiming that a 2,000-pound bomb dropped by Israeli warplanes was responsible for the civilian casualties were later discounted because the size of the crater pointed to a smaller munition. Then, the Associated Press, Wall Street Journal CNN as well as US sources placed the blame on Hamas, pointing to an Al Jazeera video clip that seemed to show sparks from a misfired rocket-propelled device of the kind used by Palestinian groups. Two weeks (and one editor’s note) later, a report by The New York Times Visual Investigations Team used video analysis and geolocation to cast doubt on the location of the missile seen in the Al Jazeera video. None of these investigations revealed the actual cause of the explosion at Al-Ahli Hospital, nor did they conclusively point to who is responsible. Such a lack of conclusive findings reveals a key limitation of OSI. Despite the method’s investigative power and utility, like other investigations, OSI relies on the clarity and accuracy of their sources and evidence.

Bellingcat founder and creative director Elliott Higgins told Mother Jones, “The problem has been that a lot of people expect solid answers very, very quickly. Realistically, that’s not possible [but] this isn’t the kind of conflict where people are happy with uncertainty.”

Despite ongoing open-source investigations, the argument over responsibility for the explosion, like the war itself, continues with no apparent end in sight.

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