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Methodologies
Forums
Exhibitions
The 2014 conflict in Gaza, which followed the murder by Hamas of three Israeli teenagers, ultimately claimed the lives of thousands of civilians. Many of those were Gazan, killed by Israeli air and ground bombardment.
The Gaza Platform, constructed in collaboration with the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), and Amnesty International, allows users to explore a database of Israeli strikes on Gaza during that conflict.
The platform is the most comprehensive public repository of information about the 2014 conflict, listing over 2,750 individual events, and recording the deaths of more than 2,200 people, including eighteen hundred civilians, six hundred of them children. The platform uses text, photos, videos, audio recordings and satellite imagery to document the war and its casualties.
Beyond overall figures and statistics about the conflict, every death is linked to a specific event, for which all available details and context are given. The platform does not only give access to a large quantity of otherwise dispersed data, but helps to make sense of it by revealing trends and making links between dispersed individual events. Patterns identified across fifty days of conflict contribute to an assessment of the conduct of Israeli forces and their conformity or otherwise with the provisions of international humanitarian law.
It is important to note that the platform does not record the impact of every Israeli attack during the 2014 conflict, only those for which a report is available. As such, the total number of casualties documented by the platform falls short of the total recorded by the UN.
Methodology
Methodology
Beyond the 2014 conflict, this project was intended to create a tool that could be similarly employed in future conflicts, whether in Gaza or elsewhere, to collect research findings and casualty reports, and reveal emerging patterns that could be used to apply pressure concerning human rights violations in real time.
The platform was developed in PATTRN, our open-source participatory mapping software.
Most of the data in the Gaza Platform was collected in the field by two Gaza-based human rights organisations: the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights (Al Mezan) and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR).
During the conflict their fieldworkers worked constantly to collect and verify information about attacks. Each organisation put out a daily press release of incidents documented that day, and those press releases have formed the basis of the dataset.
The Platform also contains information from two documents produced by Al Mezan that provide an updated record of incidents in the Gaza City and North Gaza districts during the entirety of the conflict.
The database is structured by incidents of attacks by Israeli forces. An attack is defined by a place (geographical coordinates) and a time. A single attack can be made up of multiple strikes. For example, a warning missile fired at a house, followed by a bomb 10 minutes later, would be recorded as one attack. Two bombs dropped on the same house 12 hours apart would be recorded as two attacks.