The Institute for Palestine Studies: Documenting and Targeting Destruction of the Health Sector in the Gaza Strip
Reviewed by: Alexandra Millatmal
Review date: March 26, 2025
Site Links:
Archive Link:
- Documenting the Targeting and Destruction of the Health Sector in the Gaza Strip: https://archive.ph/mkvsN
- Institute for Palestinian Studies Digital Projects home page: https://archive.ph/aKv0D
Keywords: Archiving, Activism and Advocacy, First Nations and Indigenous Studies, Palestine Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Preservation
Data Sources:
- Second-hand public records (from sources including the United Nations, World Health Organization, the Palestinian Ministry of Health, non-governmental organizations, news media)
- First-hand audio and video testimonies
- Policy papers
- Summarizations/biographies of health care workers who were abducted, killed, or disappeared
- Social media profiles, posts, and videos
Processes:
- Collating
- Categorizing
- Summarizing
Presentation:
The project is a website that collects and organizes information about health facilities in Gaza and the ways they and their workers have been impacted by Israel’s siege on the occupied territory, specifically since October 2023. The site features sections on facilities, workers, public records of medelacide (the intentional and systematic destruction of healthcare infrastructure; Mueller, 2025) policy papers, testimonials, and analysis blogs. Materials exist in both English and Arabic.
Digital Tools Used:
- Cloudflare hosting
- Drupal CMS
- HTML and jQuery
Languages:
- Arabic
- English
Review
The project Documenting the Targeting and Destruction of the Health Sector in the Gaza Strip aims to provide “comprehensive information on the most horrific assault on health in the history of the Palestinian struggle” and serve as an archival resource for researchers. It self-describes as a work-in-progress, reliant on secondary sources in its first iteration. It is one of a number of digital projects developed by the Institute for Palestinian Studies (IPS), an academic organization headquartered in Beirut.
The site is composed of five distinct sections: Health Facilities, Health Workers, Public Records, Testimonies from the Genocide, and Policy Papers and Analysis. Each section provides a different lens from which to view data on — almost like different cross-sections of — the same unfolding phenomenon: the unchecked, real-time obliteration of Gaza’s civil society infrastructure by the Israeli Occupation Forces.
The Health Facilities section documents every facility that was once operating in the Gaza Strip, its type, ownership, governorates in which it operates, capacity, and founding date. Each facility has its own standalone asset page that provides further details, like descriptions, tags for the type of specialized practices and equipment, related testimonies, and a timeline of major targeting and assault of the facility during the ongoing genocide. Each facility is listed as functional, partially functional, or non-functional.
The Health Workers section features pictures and short biographies of medical workers in Gaza who have been disappeared, killed, abducted, and — rarely — released. Each person’s stand-alone biography page features a photo and birthday, as well as a list of sources and key events related to this person, and a link to the page of the medical facility where they worked. Rarely, as in the case of Muhammad Abu Salamiya and his release from Israeli detention, there are related video testimonials.
The Public Records section features a collection of secondary sources reporting on the attacks on healthcare facilities and workers, listed in chronological order and most-often linking out to a digitized PDF of the report (though sometimes the report text is copied in as text on a standalone asset page within the site).
The Policy Papers and analysis section is seemingly the most straight-forward, with papers from the IPS academic journal and blog posts written in both English and Arabic, as well as past lecture series in Arabic, and frontline video recorded statements and analyses from doctors working in Gaza.
The Testimonies from the Genocide page features primary-source Arabic-language video testimony from health care workers in Gaza. Some of these videos have metadata like subject tags, descriptions, and the name and role of the testifier, though others do not. Many appear to be pulled from social media. Few videos have in-video transcription or captioning and none are yet translated into English.
While I would argue that the site’s greatest strength is its composability, and the ways that different pieces of the record can be arranged to inform one another — a testimony may appear in the aggregate collection of testimonies, and on a facility page, and on a biography page — it’s also a little hard to see the data from a birds’ eye view. This makes perfect sense given it is detailing currently unfolding war crimes during an active genocide, and I’m curious to know if there have been any comparable real-time archiving projects of similar kinds of destruction.
The project meets its goals quite well, and I take particular note of the variety of sources that provide the site its meaning. A policy paper by Jasbir K. Paur is available to review and cite, alongside UN reports and a memorial Facebook post from a Gazan doctor’s association. This project feels like an invaluable collection that is waiting for expansion, further refinement and categorization, and some meta-analysis.
How are the collaborative aspects reflected in the project and are there elements that work particularly well?
It is clear that the institutional prominence of the IPS helps in developing resources for the site, particularly when it comes to recorded analysis panels and publications. It’s also just so clear that there is an importance to this kind of testimonial, witnessing, and record-keeping across both institutional and interpersonal players in Palestine, and those different registers of public record all come together in this project.
Do you see an opportunity for collaboration that would be helpful to the project?
I think there could be an opportunity for researchers who are less directly impacted by the ongoing violence in Gaza to help by adding organization to some of the records of the site — for example, help display updates to facilities on a timeline, or place incidents on some kind of time lapsed map — in order to provide users more angles from which to consider the data. Additionally, there is also the need to transcribe and translate site video material.
Citation
Mueller, J. C. (2025). Medelacide: the intentional and systematic destruction of healthcare infrastructure. Global Social Challenges Journal (published online ahead of print 2025). Retrieved Mar 29, 2025, from https://doi.org/10.1332/27523349Y2025D000000037