There is comprehensive documentation of the massacres Hamas committed But documenting the dead from Israel’s offensive in Gaza has been a much bigger challenge.

 https://apps.npr.org/gaza-building-israel-strike-casualties/

NPR published a detailed visual investigation into one of the deadliest Israeli attacks of the war in Gaza. Here’s why we decided to do that. There is comprehensive documentation of the massacres Hamas committed on Oct. 7, 2023, including lists of the victims and body camera footage by the attackers. But documenting the dead from Israel’s offensive in Gaza has been a much bigger challenge.

Mahmoud Rehan/NPR

Israel bars international journalists from independent entry to Gaza. Health officials in Gaza have now reported more than 50,000 Palestinians killed by Israel’s military, more than half of them women and children, but the death tolls leave many unanswered questions. They do not distinguish between combatants and civilians and do not include thousands believed to be dead under rubble. So when the news broke that scores of relatives from one extended family had been killed in an Israeli strike on their five-story apartment building in October 2024, we asked Mahmoud Rehan, one of the few remaining Palestinian photojournalists in the area, to meet the survivors. He sent back an astonishing photograph: a two-page list of the victims, handwritten in small Arabic letters by a 27-year-old woman named Ola Abu Naser.  She wrote down name after name as she helped identify her relatives’ bodies and bury them in mass graves. She then escaped the battlezone of her neighborhood, passing an Israeli checkpoint for a cousin’s home elsewhere in northern Gaza. She had preserved their names. The death toll she tallied was 132 relatives and two others sheltering in their building. Not only was that number higher than what had been previously reported by media outlets, it meant this Israeli strike was one of the deadliest of the war. The Israeli military said it was targeting an enemy spotter serving as a lookout on the roof, which survivors from the building denied. A senior military commander told us the army was battling Hamas in the area, and would not have hit the building if it had known it was full of people. We wanted to go beyond the numbers.  About two weeks after the strike, we began to convert Abu Naser's handwritten lists of the dead and wounded into a database. Then we began connecting the dots, mapping out their kinships into a big family tree stretching back four generations. Abu Naser answered our persistent questions via text — whenever she managed to get an internet signal in Gaza. It took us about four months to piece it all together, with help from three other Gaza journalists on our team: Ahmed Abuhamda, Abu Bakr Bashir and Anas Baba. As we connected the branches of this felled family tree, stories began to emerge. They were the stories of a persistent, hardworking family building a safe haven in an increasingly chaotic, crowded space. There was pride: a grandson named after his grandfather or a patriarch and matriarch presiding over children and grandchildren. There was potential: young couples with infants or unborn babies on the way.  It is hard to comprehend the number: 132 relatives killed together. But reconstructing the family tree helped us picture it — four generations nearly wiped out. The youngest victim, Sham Abu Naser, was a 6-week-old girl. The eldest, Issa Abu Naser, was her 79-year-old great-grandfather.