Women in Gaza, war archivists: this is how they save memories

THEand wars don’t just destroy things: not just houses, hospitals, schools. And not just the lives of individuals. Wars can also destroy the memory of peoples. This is what Gaza risks: while the conflict continues to erase neighborhoods and families, memories, signs of people’s lives and their culture are also lost. The danger is clearly felt, and in particular by women, traditional custodians of family memories. This is why many of them who have the opportunity are transforming themselves into true archivists of the war. Photographers, journalists, artists, researchers, mothers: they are collecting images, names, voice recordings, family photographs, recipes, birth certificates, objects recovered from the rubble. Testimonies of the Palestinian genocide but above all fragments of their daily lives saved from oblivion.

Photographers, researchers, mothers: who are the “war archivists” who will save the memory of Gaza

More than six months after the US-brokered ceasefire agreement, Gaza remains a wasteland: rubble under which thousands of Palestinian bodies are still trapped. Rubble infested with mice and parasites (this is the new emergency, denounced by various NGOs). Rubble around which, without drinking water and in fear, people try to catch up and maintain snippets of everyday life, while letting go of everything else.

But the risk that there will be nothing left is real and terrible. Hence what the researchers defined fighting erasure, fight cancellation. The international project coordinated by Jamila Ghaddar which, between the University of Amsterdam and the American University of Beirut, works precisely on this: documenting the destruction of Palestinian archives and creating forms of collective memory preservation.

Palestinian photographers, reporters of everyday life

In early 2026, several international exhibitions began showcasing the work of Palestinian photographers. And no longer just as war reports, but as real ones visual archives of a society threatened with disappearance. In New York and Athens, the exhibition Eyes in Gaza II collected images from twenty-two Palestinian photojournalists, many of whom are still in the Strip. The project was born from the idea that each photograph does not just document an event, but preserves evidence of a daily life that risks being erased.

Samar Abu Elouf and the portrait of Mahmoud Ajjour

‘s photographic research goes in this direction Samar Abu Elouf, today one of the most recognized Palestinian reporters internationally. Self-taught, she has been documenting civilian life in Gaza since 2010: women at work, children in shelters, families during displacement, maternity in times of war. After being evacuated in 2023, she continues to work from Qatar building a photographic archive of Gaza “before” and “during” the conflict. In 2025, one of his images became the global symbol of the devastation of war: the portrait of Mahmoud Ajjour, a nine-year-old boy who lost both arms in an air attack while trying to escape with his family. Photography won the World Press Photo and it was defined by the jury as “a silent photo that speaks very loudly”.

Abu Elouf lives today in the same Doha residential complex where Mahmoud is trying to rebuild his life. She continued to follow him after the evacuation. While he learns to write using his feet, he observes others playing, he tries to regain some possible normality. In this sense the photographs do not function only as a denunciation. They become archives of human continuity.

Fatima Shbair and the human cost of war

Also Fatima Shbair, photographer associated with Reuters, in the last months in which she remained in the Strip (she is currently displaced in Dubai), she has built a systematic documentation of civil life in the conflict.

His images tell above all the daily burden of war on women: women’s funerals, improvised kitchens in refugee camps, mothers waiting for news in front of hospitals, children sleeping in tents. In a long reportage by Guardian Dedicated to war photographers, her work is described as some of the most impactful in showing “the human cost” of displacement and hunger in Gaza.

Huda Skaik and the photographers «archivists of loss and life in Gaza»

There Palestinian journalist Huda Skaik (on The Nation) wrote that Gaza photographers have become “archivists of loss and life”: not simple chroniclers of destruction, but guardians of a threatened cultural continuity. «In Gaza, the camera lens does more than just capture a scene. It documents the human spirit that resists death. And for photographers in Gaza, every shot is an act of defiance. Each image carries with it risk, memory and moral weight. They photograph through smoke and mourning, through hunger and destruction, and through the pain of seeing the people they love become the subjects of their work.”

But the archiving work it doesn’t just come from professional photography. It also goes through mobile phones, audio notes, notebooks saved during displacement. Real finds that Gazans are trying to save. Likewise, ordinary people. Those women who, as Skaik describes them, even «in overcrowded refugee camps, in shelters exposed to the elements and in improvised homes that barely offer protection, resist, not by choice, but because there is no alternative. Mothers who comfort their sons during amputations without anesthesia, daughters who bury their parents, and wives who carry the unbearable pain of losing a husband in a single air strike.”

The widespread story of the war, through smartphones

The very way we talk about wars is thus changing: no longer just “recorded” by official archives and military documents. Today, thanks to the availability of technologies, memory also comes from private photos and videos spread by social media. Here too, not without risks. Organizations working on digital rights, such as7amleh – Digital Rights Weekly Updatethey started talking openly about “digital erasure”: the possibility that Palestinian testimonies are submerged in the continuous flow of online platforms. It is the story of the two Palestinian content creators Nour Alsaqa and Salma Shawa.

Nour Alsaqa, content creator in Gaza

Before October 7, Nour Alsaqa used Instagram to share works of art, important moments in his life and glimpses of his life in Gaza. On October 8, he posted a video of buildings being razed.

After that post she continued to document, while her passion also grew within her resentment towards those who look and shake elsewhereas this article on Wired Middle East. «We thought that by showing all our vulnerabilities online we would gain empathy. That people would intervene, they would move. But exactly the opposite happened: social media has contributed to dehumanizing Palestinians».

Salma Shawa, the effort of testimony, the commitment to remain visible

Creating content to document Israeli air raids and famine, experiencing it firsthand, is physically and emotionally exhausting. But the expectation is that visibility leads to action: this is at the heart of Gaza’s digital experience. But social media has made it all too easy to think that sharing or liking a post is enough. To be seen, Palestinians must also juggle the algorithm and human nature.

«People become desensitized. Their attention span is limitedso you have to capture them in the first five seconds, otherwise they won’t stick with you,” he says Salma Shawa. «Creators learned they had to prioritize emotion over facts and connect suffering to pop culture moments just to remain visible.”

Passing down traditional recipes in wartime

Even daily life can become an archive. Teaching children the names of missing relatives, telling the story of a destroyed home. Or continue to cook traditional dishes in extreme conditionswith what there is, and then share the recipes on Instagram.

Like that of the maqluba, revisited in “false maqluba”, because there is no more meat to prepare it. Or corned beef shawarma (theEgyptian researcher Noha Atef studied these posts, and how food has become «a means through which people express resilience and preserve cultural identity»).

The women of Gaza who save culture from the rubble

And there are those who then try to save culture too. Groups likeEyes on Heritage Institute (led by 33-year-old architect Haneen al-Amasi) continue to risk their lives to recover rare texts and manuscripts from the rubble.

For centuries, women have kept family memories: photo albums, genealogies, recipes, letters. But in Gaza that invisible work is increasingly taking on a political dimension. It is not just a matter of documenting death but of preventing evidence of that life, and of a culture, from disappearing.