French researchers draw up an inventory of Gaza’s heritage – Technologist

The idea was born one night in February 2024 as the war in Gaza once again disturbed the sleep of Fabrice Virgili, historian and director of research at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, the French state research organization), a specialist in war zones. “As Israeli bombardments wipe Gaza off the map and our sense of powerlessness grows, what can we do as researchers?” Drawing up an inventory of Gaza’s bombed-out heritage and tracking the state of destruction of each UNESCO-listed site seemed an academically sound and symbolically important option.

The next morning, in the elevator at Campus Condorcet, a humanities and social sciences research center in Aubervilliers that brings together 11 universities, he shared the idea of the project with colleagues including Malika Rahal, historian and director of the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, and Eric Denis, research director at the CNRS’s Géographie-cités research group. After a few phone calls and multiple meetings, the trio brought together a dozen researchers – historians, archaeologists, political scientists, geographers, sociologists, conflict and war remnants specialists – who shared the same desire to act.

To document the destruction, the team relies on open-source digital data (OSINT), notably from the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT), along with maps produced by UNESCO and Oxford University. The latter has developed an Automatic Change Detection (ACD) system using Google Earth Engine (GEE). The inventory includes cinemas, libraries, museums (such as Qasr al-Basha) and cemeteries. The distribution of infrastructure documentation is allocated according to the expertise of each researcher.

Satellite image resources

Among the sites documented are the Al-Qissariya souk, an iconic market in the heart of Gaza’s old town, and the An-Nasr cinema, built in 1956, and a symbol of the golden age of Palestinian cinema. “It is our responsibility to record the history of each of these places and to help prepare as best we can for their restoration or, at the very least, to preserve their memory,” wrote the researchers on their Gaza Histoire website.

The researchers also draw on the work of eight independent research groups, including London-based Forensic Architecture, which conducted a study of agricultural areas, and the Institut des Etudes Palestiniennes, which looked at health system infrastructures. At a time when 139 journalists have been killed by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023, and foreign media are forbidden access, satellite imagery offers a crucial window on the Gaza enclave. Despite frequent communication and internet blackouts, the academics regularly exchange information with their Gazan colleagues specializing in heritage preservation.

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