Hamas-Israel war: all data from the October 7 attack archived at the National Library in Jerusalem

“Two days after October 7, when we recovered from the initial shock and understood the enormity of the catastrophe that had befallen this country, we began to collect (documents),” explains to the 'AFP Raquel Ukeles, director of collections at the National Library of Israel.

The witnesses first confide in one of the Israeli projects, such as “Edut 710” (“October 7 Testimony”), aimed at gathering traces – testimonies, WhatsApp messages, photographs and videos – linked to the atrocities of October 7 . This data is then centralized by the National Library of Israel (NLI) which has set up a database of “unprecedented” scale, powered by dozens of local and international initiatives, indicates Raquel Ukeles.

That day, hundreds of armed men infiltrated Israeli communities on the edge of the Gaza Strip, military bases, roads, a music festival, a beach and towns, killing hundreds of people of all ages. The attack resulted in the deaths of more than 1,160 people, the majority civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data. Around 250 people were kidnapped and taken to Gaza and, according to Israel, 130 hostages are still being held there, 30 of whom are dead, according to Israeli authorities. In retaliation, Israel launched an offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which it took control of in 2007, which left more than 29,000 dead, the vast majority civilians, according to the Hamas Health Ministry. Figures that are not verifiable.

Testimonies of the terror experienced by Israelis on October 7, images of victims tortured and summarily shot, filmed by GoPro cameras and phones of Hamas commandos, circulate rapidly on social networks, sometimes broadcast in real time on family accounts the victims. Collecting these digital documents was the first emergency “because they were disappearing,” explains Ukeles, specifying that in the three weeks following October 7, the library collected 200,000 video segments. In total, it plans to collect, analyze and archive “60 terabytes of material, the equivalent of 50 billion pages”, a work that will take years.

More than four months after the events, more and more witnesses are beginning to speak out. Steven Spielberg's USC Shoah Foundation, one of the international partners in the NLI collection, collected the testimonies of some 400 witnesses to the massacres and hostage-taking. “It is a mass atrocity (...) the most significant anti-Semitic attack since the Shoah,” said its director, Robert Williams, a researcher specializing in anti-Semitism and the Shoah who collaborates in particular with UNESCO. He considers the work of collecting testimonies and evidence of the atrocities of October 7 all the more necessary in view of “the speed with which a denial of these events began to appear on social networks”.

“The mass of documentary evidence (...) is in itself proof against those who deny it,” explains Raquel Ukeles. According to her, the NLI database will make it possible to “testify to what really happened on October 7.” And “if we do our job well,” she adds, “then historians can do theirs.”