Obliterated Families brings reality of life in Gaza to global audience

‘Obliterated Families’, a new multimedia web documentary launched last week, is bringing the reality of life for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to a global audience.

The project focuses on the 142 families who lost three or more members during Israel’s 2014 offensive known as ‘Operation Protective Edge’. The web documentary format is intended to include photos, in-depth text, animations, infographics, and short videos.

The first five ‘chapters’ of the web documentary have now been released, with the remaining chapters due to come online over the rest of July and August. The project has relied on crowd funding, as previously reported on Middle East Monitor.

The authors of the web documentary are Anne Paq and Ala Qandil, along with dozens of media professionals who have joined in this work over the last two years. This is the most extensive visual documentation of lives in the aftermath of the unprecedented Israeli assault on Gaza.

Paq met and interviewed over 50 families from different parts of the Gaza Strip, from which, ten stories were chosen to be told in-depth through photos, reportage texts and short videos. Amira Hass and Raja Shehadeh have contributed prefaces.

One of the families, the Shuheibars, had kept a fragment of the bomb that killed three children on the roof of their home. Military experts hired by a French human rights NGO confirmed that the piece was produced by a French company Eurofarad, later acquired by Exxelia Group.

At the end of last month, the Shuheibars had a complaint submitted on their behalf against the company for their “complicity in war crimes and involuntary manslaughter”, the first time that a Palestinian family has attempted to file a complaint against a private company in France, and possibly in Europe, for complicity in war crimes.