Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War — Lee Mordechai

Lee Mordechai is an associate professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Beginning in March 2024 he compiled and published Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War, a document written first in Hebrew and then translated into English, which assembles and footnotes the evidence he has collected on the conduct of the war. It is maintained as a living document and has been updated continuously since publication.

Its method is what makes it useful to an archive. Mordechai does not primarily argue; he assembles, cites and dates, linking each claim to eyewitness testimony, video, photography, investigative reporting or official statements, and organising the material into thematic chapters — among them the massacre of Palestinians, the causing of civilian deaths, ethnic cleansing, and dehumanisation. The dehumanisation chapter collects the statements and their contexts as a category of evidence in their own right, which is precisely how the ICJ and the UN Commission of Inquiry later treated them.

Mordechai writes as an Israeli citizen and describes the document as his own testimony and dissent, stating that the evidence he has examined has been sufficient for him to believe that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza. He is a historian by training rather than a lawyer, and the document is a compiled evidentiary record rather than a legal determination; its value is that it lets a reader go to the underlying sources directly.

The site has since outgrown the compilation it started as. bearing-witness.com now presents itself as Witnessing the Gaza War, a multi-contributor project publishing in Hebrew, English and Arabic, with a testimony collection, a searchable evidence database, a damage assessment map of Gaza and separate reports on starvation and on the destruction of the healthcare system, alongside a volunteer and contact page. Mordechai’s own document — the one this entry is about — sits within it at /bigger-picture/, and that is the link to cite when the document rather than the project is meant. A reader who cites the root URL as though it were a single-author compilation is describing the project as it was in 2024, not as it is.

Why it matters

• A large, continuously updated and fully footnoted evidentiary compilation, assembled by an Israeli academic and maintained as a living document.
• Its dehumanisation chapter treats official statements as documentary evidence, gathered with citations a reader can follow.
• It is built for verification rather than persuasion, which makes it a starting point for research rather than a substitute for it.
• Its growth into a multi-contributor project is itself worth noting: a personal act of documentation that became an institution.

Key resources

• The document itself — Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War, The Bigger Picture
• Witnessing the Gaza War — the wider project (Hebrew, English and Arabic)