{"id":17318,"date":"2026-11-09T10:21:16","date_gmt":"2026-11-09T07:21:16","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2026-11-09T10:21:16","modified_gmt":"2026-11-09T07:21:16","slug":"seize-delete-deny-israels-war-on-its-own-record-from-the-mavi-marmara-to-gaza-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harici.com.tr\/en\/seize-delete-deny-israels-war-on-its-own-record-from-the-mavi-marmara-to-gaza-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Seize, delete, deny: Israel\u2019s war on its own record, from the Mavi Marmara to Gaza \u2013 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thomas Karat, behavioral analyst\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The Mavi Marmara had sailed from Istanbul’s Sarayburnu port<\/a><\/span> on 22 May 2010, bound for Gaza with aid. On 31 May, after Israeli commandos had taken the ship in international waters and nine of the people aboard lay dead, a Turkish reporter named K\u00fcr\u015fat Bayhan tried to save his work by hiding his camera’s memory card under his tongue. It was found<\/a><\/span> during a medical examination and taken from him. Around sixty journalists came off the flotilla at Ashdod that week, and all of their recorded media was confiscated, never to be returned. In the days that followed, the Israeli military released short, edited clips drawn in part from the material it had seized, and its account of the raid dominated<\/a><\/span> coverage while the survivors were held without contact. For about forty-eight hours, while survivors were held incommunicado<\/a><\/span>, the clips released by Israel, edited from the ship’s security cameras and from equipment taken off journalists, were most of what the world saw. On 3 June the Committee to Protect Journalists accused Israel of confiscating journalistic material and then manipulating<\/a><\/span> it to serve its own interests. A United Nations fact-finding mission later recorded that a large quantity of video and photographs from the vessels, including much of the assault on the Mavi Marmara itself, had been taken by the Israeli authorities and not returned<\/a><\/span>. The seized material stayed useful to its holders long after the raid. Months later, while the Israeli chief of staff was giving testimony about the operation, army radio released a further short clip from the confiscated videos, a timing one Israeli outlet read as a domestic<\/a><\/span> political move. The Turkish photojournalist Cevdet K\u0131l\u0131\u00e7lar was among those killed on the ship, and a Canadian aid worker, Kevin Neish, who hid the memory card from his own camera and later smuggled<\/a><\/span> it out, published photographs of the dead that the official clips had left out. What survived reached the public because individuals beat the search, among them two Turkish journalists, Adem \u00d6zk\u00f6se and \u015eefik Din\u00e7, who smuggled their work home or recovered<\/a><\/span> it from damaged cards.<\/p>\n

Readers in T\u00fcrkiye know that method from their own history. The state seizes the cameras, holds the witnesses until the story has set and then releases whatever selection supports the official version. It is the maritime equivalent of the colonial bonfires described in the first part of this series, where Britain burned or sank the files that might embarrass it and later locked away the rest. Both methods rest on one condition. The state has to hold the only copies. In Gaza since October 2023 that condition has failed, because a large part of the evidence was recorded by Israeli soldiers on their own phones and published by them, under their own names, before anyone in authority could decide what the public would be allowed to see.<\/p>\n

The most common scene in that material is a demolition. Engineers thread explosives through the houses of an entire street, a countdown runs, and a block of homes drops at once into a single rolling cloud, while the men who set the charges cheer and the man holding the phone keeps it steady on the collapse. The same footage recurs across Gaza in thousands<\/a><\/span> of clips filmed by unit after unit<\/a>,<\/span> some dedicating a detonation to a fallen comrade or to a holiday at home. One soldier captioned the levelling of houses in Rafah “renovations in Gaza.”<\/a> <\/span>The Fourth Geneva Convention bars an occupying power from destroying civilian property unless military operations make it absolutely necessary, and it lists extensive destruction of property, carried out unlawfully and wantonly and without military necessity, among the grave breaches that constitute war crimes<\/a><\/span>. Footage of soldiers celebrating the collapse of a residential block is poor evidence of necessity. Demolition compelled by an operational requirement gives no occasion for a victory song, and the soundtrack records the attitude in which the decision was carried out.<\/p>\n

The second recurring scene shows detainees. Across the Strip soldiers filmed men they had rounded up, who had been stripped to their underwear and blindfolded before being made to kneel in long rows, and they filmed themselves standing over them. In December 2023 a soldier named Yossi Gamzoo posted footage of a Palestinian stripped and bound, bleeding, under interrogation at Gaza College<\/a><\/span> and then marched barefoot through the street, along with a second clip from Yarmouk<\/a><\/span> stadium in which hundreds of men kneel in rows, many in their underwear and some blindfolded, with three women on their knees behind a goal. Another soldier, later identified as Ilya Blank<\/a><\/span>, set a montage of blindfolded detainees packed into a pickup truck, with a comrade grinning and raising his thumb beside them, to an Israeli rap track. The Geneva Conventions require that people in custody be treated humanely and protected against insults and public curiosity<\/a><\/span>. Legal scholars who examined this footage for the BBC concluded that it breached<\/a><\/span> those protections. Two named soldiers stand here for a practice that was widespread and openly displayed, posted by men who expected their audience to approve.<\/p>\n

The same practice reached the occupied West Bank. In December 2023, during a three-day military operation in the Jenin refugee camp, reservists filmed themselves inside a mosque reciting the Shema Yisrael and singing Hanukkah songs over the loudspeaker<\/a><\/span> normally used for the call to prayer, one of them standing on the minbar. Graffiti left in the building read, among other things, greetings from the Gaza envelope<\/a><\/span>. The army said the conduct contradicted its values and removed the soldiers from operational duty. Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, meanwhile posted the video on his own Telegram channel, presenting it as a prayer<\/a><\/span> performed by heroic soldiers. T\u00fcrkiye’s Foreign Ministry condemned the incident as a provocation<\/a><\/span>. The episode compressed the whole problem into a single week. The military moved to discipline the men who had filmed the act, while a cabinet minister circulated the same footage to his followers as something to admire, which left the state disowning and promoting one recording at the same moment.<\/p>\n

Some of the gravest material emerged by a different route, through a leak rather than a boast. On 6 August 2024 Israel’s Channel 12 broadcast surveillance<\/a><\/span> footage from Sde Teiman, a military detention camp in southern Israel holding Palestinians taken from Gaza. It showed soldiers leading a detainee aside and surrounding him with riot shields<\/a><\/span>, so that what was done to him took place just outside the camera’s view. The military’s own indictment<\/a><\/span> later described what the shields concealed. Soldiers had attacked the man with severe violence and inserted a sharp object that penetrated near his rectum<\/a><\/span> and tore the rectal wall, leaving him with fractured ribs and a punctured lung. The broadcast characterised the attack as a rape, while the charges filed stopped at aggravated assault<\/a><\/span>. What followed belongs at the centre of this account. Israel arrested<\/a><\/span> a senior military lawyer on suspicion of having leaked the video, and the military advocate general’s office later withdrew<\/a><\/span> the indictments against the reservists. The legal jeopardy moved from the men in the footage to the official accused of letting the public see it.<\/p>\n

Once the soldiers’ own posts were public, others began to organise them into evidence. The Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi spent months identifying soldiers and units from what they had published, including a sniper team he traced after one of its members uploaded a video recounting the unit’s operations in Gaza City that showed unarmed people being shot<\/a><\/span>. He collected post after post of soldiers posing with the lingerie and the mannequins<\/a><\/span> of women whose homes they had occupied, and Al Jazeera’s investigative unit compiled a database of more than two and a half thousand accounts belonging to serving soldiers. A Belgian organisation, the Hind Rajab Foundation<\/a><\/span>, began converting that material into criminal complaints, identifying individual soldiers from their own publications and filing cases in the countries they visited. Within a year it had lodged around fifty<\/a><\/span> complaints and submitted the names of a thousand soldiers<\/a><\/span> to the International Criminal Court, supported by thousands of items of footage and posts. A judge in Brazil issued an arrest warrant against one soldier, who avoided it by crossing into Argentina<\/a><\/span>. A complaint in Portugal relied on a sniper’s own online boast<\/a><\/span> of four bullets fired without a miss. In Belgium the foundation filed a further complaint against a dual national from the same sniper team, built around the siege of a Gaza hospital<\/a><\/span>. The Israeli military responded by warning its personnel to stop publishing details of their service and by advising some of them to leave the countries they were visiting before they could be detained<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n

The footage reached the highest court available to states. When South Africa brought its case under the Genocide Convention to the International Court of Justice, its counsel played the soldiers’ videos<\/a><\/span> in the courtroom and read out statements soldiers had made on camera as evidence of intent. The court found that the Palestinians’ claimed right to protection from genocide was plausible<\/a><\/span> and issued binding provisional measures, among them an order that Israel prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation<\/a><\/span> of evidence related to the allegations. A later order required Israel to admit United Nations investigators<\/a><\/span> to Gaza. T\u00fcrkiye, a party to the Genocide Convention, submitted its own declaration of intervention<\/a><\/span> in the case on 7 August 2024 under Article 63 of the Court’s Statute, and the Court invited South Africa and Israel to submit written observations<\/a><\/span> on the request, months after Ankara had suspended<\/a><\/span> trade with Israel over the war. In November 2025 the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office announced arrest warrants on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity against 37<\/a><\/span> Israeli officials, among them the prime minister, the defence minister and the chief of the general staff. Israel’s foreign minister rejected the warrants with contempt and called them a PR stunt<\/a><\/span>, arguing that the Turkish judiciary had become a political instrument and citing the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor earlier that year. The warrants have no force outside T\u00fcrkiye, and their weight lies in the record they help assemble. The International Criminal Court had already issued warrants<\/a><\/span> for the prime minister and his former defence minister a year earlier. Across these proceedings the soldiers’ own recordings form part of the evidentiary base, which means the state now faces courts in The Hague and prosecutors abroad with material its own personnel produced and published.<\/p>\n

From that point the work of erasure ran in reverse. A government that in 2010 had held the cameras now had to recover material already copied onto other people’s devices. In February 2024 the chief of the general staff, Herzi Halevi, wrote to commanders instructing soldiers not to loot and not to film revenge videos<\/a><\/span>, and soldiers who had posted demolition footage were told to remove it. The concern, as described by the military’s own people, was that the clips could feed the cases<\/a><\/span> building at the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. By mid-2025 the chief military censor had issued an order restricting<\/a><\/span> what could be posted about strikes altogether, an order Haaretz described as legally invalid<\/a><\/span>. By 2026 the army’s chief of staff had asked military lawyers to examine legal action<\/a><\/span> against the makers of a prize-winning documentary in which soldiers described the deliberate killing of civilians in Gaza. The effort that had begun with deleting a conscript’s post extended, within two years, to pursuing those who assembled such material into a public account.<\/p>\n

The removal of evidence also operated on the platforms, and it fell unevenly. In October and November 2023 Human Rights Watch documented more than a thousand takedowns and suppressions of Palestinian content on Instagram and Facebook. Of the 1,050 cases it reviewed, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestinians, and a single case<\/a><\/span> involved content supporting Israel. The organisation identified six recurring patterns<\/a><\/span> of suppression, ranging from removal and account suspension to shadow-banning and restrictions on live video, affecting posts of evident news value<\/a><\/span>, including footage of Palestinian dead. It attributed the pattern to automated moderation and to government pressure over what the company removed, including referrals from Israel’s state cyber unit<\/a><\/span>. Users responded by misspelling the word Gaza or substituting a watermelon<\/a><\/span> for the Palestinian flag to evade the filters. A human-rights review commissioned by Meta itself had already found, before the war, that its moderation harmed<\/a><\/span> Palestinian rights. The two bodies of material differ in kind. The soldiers’ footage documents alleged crimes, while most of the suppressed Palestinian content documented what was being done to civilians. In both cases the record most damaging to the stronger party proved the harder one to keep in view.<\/p>\n

Older forms of erasure continued alongside the new. Early in the war an airstrike destroyed the Central Archives<\/a><\/span> of Gaza City, which held some 150 years of the territory’s history in roughly 110,000<\/a><\/span> documents and photographs. The library of the Islamic University of Gaza had been levelled<\/a><\/span> in the second week of fighting, and the Gaza City public library, holding about ten thousand volumes, followed. United Nations experts used the term scholasticide<\/a> <\/span>for the systematic destruction of the territory’s education system, reporting that more than eighty per cent of Gaza’s schools had been damaged or destroyed. One count put the dead at 5,479<\/a><\/span> students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors. The last functioning university was demolished in January 2024, after the army had used it for seventy days<\/a><\/span> as a base and detention site. The Committee to Protect Journalists recorded 2024 as the deadliest<\/a><\/span> year for the press since it began keeping records in 1992, with 124 journalists killed worldwide and around sixty per cent<\/a> <\/span>of the toll attributed to Israel. The dead included the journalist Hamza Dahdouh<\/a><\/span>, son of the Al Jazeera correspondent Wael Dahdouh, killed in a strike on his car, and Ismail al-Ghoul with his cameraman Rami al-Rifi, killed in a vehicle with press markings while both wore press vests. Many of those killed were freelancers<\/a><\/span> working after their newsrooms had been destroyed, filling a gap left by Israel’s refusal to admit foreign reporters except on escorted military visits, a restriction that more than fifty foreign correspondents protested<\/a> in an open letter.<\/p>\n

The oldest layer of the practice reaches back to the state’s founding. For two decades a security department of the Israeli defence ministry known by its Hebrew acronym, Malmab<\/a><\/span>, has removed documents from Israeli archives, often without legal authority<\/a><\/span> and in some cases resealing papers the military censor had already cleared, including material on the expulsions of 1948 that historians had published and cited. The largest archive in the country, that of the military itself, remains almost entirely<\/a><\/span> sealed. One historian discovered that files he had quoted fifteen years<\/a> <\/span>earlier were no longer available to him. Among the documents withdrawn was an internal report<\/a><\/span> on how Palestinian villages were emptied in the first months of the 1948 war, a record that complicates the official account of a population that left of its own accord. That is the British method in its Israeli form, the quiet withdrawal of evidence that had once been open.<\/p>\n

The motive is consistent across both parts of this series. A state that claims to conduct its wars within the law draws standing from that claim both at home and in the international forums where it seeks support. Documented abuse, examined by courts it does not control, undermines the claim and attaches it to named individuals. Britain protected that standing with fire, with retention orders and with closed courts, and the effort succeeded for half a century because the state held the only copies of the evidence. Israel controlled the record of the Mavi Marmara in 2010 by the same means, through possession of the cameras. In Gaza it has held neither the cameras nor the copies. The decisive evidence was produced by its own soldiers, distributed before any censor intervened, archived by investigators within hours and entered into proceedings at The Hague before any deletion order took effect. The first part of this series ended at Akrotiri, where Britain still withholds its surveillance footage of Gaza on grounds of national security. The contrast with the footage Israel’s own soldiers chose to publish defines the present moment. A state can seal what it alone possesses. It has far fewer means to recall a confession its personnel have already made to the world, and the scale of the effort it devotes to trying remains the clearest indication of what that confession contains.<\/p>\n

Settle, deny, seal: Britain\u2019s formula for colonial torture, from Kenya to Cyprus \u2014 1<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n