Welcome to the Gaza documentation project

Let us begin with something that everyone knows ..or maybe not everyone as current generations did not grow up in an era when there was no video but celluloid. And even then, when there were videos (VHS and Betamax), there was no YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, TikTok or Instagram. The first Internet video hosting site was ShareYourWorld.com, founded in 1997.

There are many definitions of history. However, the most simple way to explain it is to use the pictured images.

A celluloid film consists of a series of frames. Each frame is part of a scene which, in return, may be part of a series of scenes. They all together form what is called a sequence. So, a movie is built up by a series of sequences.

If you watch the whole film, you will see a chronology of frames, scenes, and sequences. In today's video technology, you don't need to stretch the movie. It's already done while you load it in a video editor.

Visualizing history is similar to this, meaning that you can imagine history as a complete movie unless you cut it into pieces to remove frames, scenes, or even a whole sequence that you don't want people to watch.

Like every movie, any event must have a beginning as nothing happens in a vacuum. There is always a main cause or root, which always lies in the very past.

And so it is about Gaza.

Gaza was once the land of the Philistines, a people, first described by the Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle. They were an ancient people who lived on the south coast of Canaan during the Iron Age.

In 1994 the Israeli colonizers began a phased transfer of governmental authority in the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority (PA) under the terms of the Oslo Accords that were signed by the colonizers and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Before the Gaza "problem" emerged, the enclave was part of the League Of Nations (predecessor of the UN) mandate of Palestine under British rule after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

It came under Egypt's military rule after European colonists, migrants, and settlers managed to drive the British out of the rest of Palestine in 1948.

Fifteen years later, Gaza became part of a problem that the British and the French also created like the Palestinian problem from 1916-1917

It all began with France and Britain losing the Suez Canal after the then-president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized it. The two countries wanted the strategically important canal back. They asked the Israelis for help. In return, France would help them with the secret construction of the Dimona nuclear reactor.

So, the Israelis attacked Egypt by invading Gaza in 1956 and colonized it until 2005, not occupied as there were at least 21 permanent settlements in the enclave. The West Bank is also under colonization since 1967 as there are more than 100 permanent but illegal settlements.

In Gaza, the "incident" of an Israeli truck that rammed a car killing four Palestinians from Jabaliyah inside, and the way how the Israelis mishandled the case, triggered the first Intifada. A bloody crackdown by the colonizing armed forces has prompted colonized people to form a resistance, that we know as Hamas.

That's how it all started, not on October 7, 2023.

The existence of Hamas is by the Israelis themselves. The group didn't emerge from out of the blue.

The Israeli crackdown of the First Intifada that inflamed the forming of Hamas, and the year in which the resistance group was formed in 1987, has been systematically silenced as "Hamas is a terrorist organization" is delegitimizing the Law Of Belligerent Occupation.

The United Nations has designated Hamas as a political movement while its armed wings are within the frame of the Law Of Belligerent Occupation, which states that occupied people have the right to form armed groups to resist occupation.

Members of the Hamas have the full right to resist the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the annexation of the West Bank. If they take and use that right, they must distinguish themselves from the civilian population, or based on articles 43 & 44 of the Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, at least carry their weapons openly during attacks and deployments.

They are even alien to the region as they descend from European migrants, settlers, and colonists, while the current population is from around the world living on a seized and annexed piece of land surrounded by countries where people have been there for centuries.

On the welcome page, we wrote:

"Like every movie, any event must have a beginning as nothing happens in a vacuum. There is always a main cause or root, which always lays in the very past."

Well. that's not the tradition in politics about Gaza and the whole issue about the question of Palestine. The views, but those supporting the Israelis are rotten to the core as they all erase the fact that nothing happens without a past if not THE past.

But, the essence is not documenting all these "views" as they are part of a picture that the Israeli occupation forces and their leaders are trying to uphold, that they are "fighting and destroying terrorists, barbarians", in other words: Hamas. 

We're sorry for the inconvenience that we can explain.

The Palestine Archive contains archives about all wars in Gaza and what the Israelis are (still) doing in the West Bank. It contains in total more than 30.000 files and is therefore too large. Upgrading the used ISP package is not the solution as the archive as a whole continues to grow.

GLOSM is a self-funded project. Technically, it is more than keeping a (huge) website online.

In addition to standard costs like your domain and package, the larger the website, the more web space you need, and the higher the monthly cost.

Then, there are extra monthly costs, such as keeping the website secure and protected. Hardware doesn't last a lifetime. You have to update, repair, or replace hardware parts occasionally.

The documentation runs locally for the reasons above.

GLOSM runs several projects.

PARES stands for Palestine Research and is its first and longest-running project. It was launched in November 2008 in response to the Israeli violation of a six-month ceasefire by defending the violation, that Hamas fired rockets from Gaza. An investigation amid the war found out that the resistance fired no rockets over the border.

The project included a months-long study on biblical history to have a better understanding of issues like the claim that Israelis are Semitic people and that their language is Jewish.

PARES is launched in the context of the way GLOSM operates, namely human research. It monitors, collects, and documents developments forthcoming from effects as a result of interference in the continuation of life and the existence of people. However,in Gaza and the West Bank, it is about attempts to end the continuation of life of people.