A woman with a child is shot while waving a white flag ■ Starving girls are crushed to death in line for bread ■ A cuffed 62-year-old man is run over, evidently by a tank ■ An aerial strike targets people trying to help a wounded boy ■ A database of thousands of videos, photos, testimonies, reports and investigations documents the horrors c article to reading list.

Footnote No. 379 of the carefully researched, wide-ranging document that historian Lee Mordechai has drawn up contains a link to a video clip. The footage shows a large dog gnawing something amid bushes. "Wai, wai, he took the terrorist, the terrorist is gone – gone in both senses," says the soldier who filmed the dog eating a corpse. After a few seconds the soldier raises the camera and adds, "But what a gorgeous view, a gorgeous sunset. A red sun is setting over the Gaza Strip." Definitely a beautiful sunset.

The report Dr. Mordechai has compiled online – "Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War" – constitutes the most methodical and detailed documentation in Hebrew (there is also an English translation) of the war crimes that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza. It is a shocking indictment comprised of thousands of entries relating to the war, to the actions of the government, the media, the Israel Defense Forces and Israeli society in general. The English translation of the seventh, and to date latest version of the text, is 124 pages long and contains over 1,400 footnotes referencing thousands of sources, including eyewitness reports, video footage, investigatory materials, articles and photographs.

For example, there are links to texts and other kinds of testimony describing acts attributed to IDF soldiers who were seen "shooting civilians waving white flags, abuse of individuals, captives and corpses, gleefully damaging or destroying houses, various structures and institutions, religious sites and looting personal belongings, as well as randomly firing their weapons, shooting local animals, destroying private property, burning books within libraries, defacing Palestinian and Islamic symbols (including burning Qurans and turning mosques into dining spaces)."

One link takes readers to a video of a soldier in Gaza waving a large sign taken from a barber shop in the town of Yehud, in central Israel, with bodies strewn around him. Other links are to footage of soldiers deployed in Gaza reading the Book of Esther, as is customary on the festival of Purim, but every time the name of the wicked Haman is uttered, instead of simply shaking traditional noisemakers, they fire a mortar shell. A soldier is seen forcing bound and blindfolded prisoners to send regards to his family and to say they want to be its slaves. Soldiers are photographed holding stacks of money they plundered from Gazan homes. An IDF bulldozer is seen destroying a large pile of food packages from a humanitarian-aid agency. A soldier sings the children's ditty "Next year we'll burn the school" – while a school is seen in flames in the background. And there are plenty of clips of soldiers modeling women's underwear that they looted.

Footnote No. 379 appears in a subsection titled "De-humanization in the IDF" that's included in the chapter called "Israeli discourse and de-humanization of Palestinians." It contains hundreds of examples of the cruel behavior displayed by Israeli society and the state's institutions vis-à-vis Gaza's suffering inhabitants – from a prime minister who talks about Amalek, to the figure of 18,000 calls by Israelis on social media to flatten the Strip, to Israeli physicians who voice support of the bombing of Gazan hospitals, to the stand-up comic joking about the death of Palestinians, and includes a chorus of children sweetly singing, "Within a year, we will annihilate everyone and then we will return to plow our fields," set to the melody of the iconic War of Independence-era song, "Shir Hare'ut" (Song of Camaraderie).

The links in "Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War" also lead to graphic footage of bodies strewn about, in every possible condition; of people crushed under rubble; of puddles of blood; and of the cries of people who lost their entire families in an instant. There are items attesting to the killing of disabled people, humiliation and sexual assaults, the torching of homes, forced starvation, random shooting, looting, abuse of corpses and much more.

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Even if not each and every one of the testimonies can be corroborated, the picture that arises from them is of an army that in the best case has lost control of many units, whose soldiers proceeded to do whatever struck their fancy, and in the worst case is allowing its personnel to commit the most atrocious war crimes imaginable.

Mordechai cites evidence of the horrific predicaments the war has forced upon Gazans. A physician who amputates his niece's leg on a kitchen table, without anesthesia, using a kitchen knife. People eating horse flesh and grass, or drinking sea water to ameliorate their hunger. Women compelled to give birth in a classroom crowded with people. Doctors helplessly looking on as wounded people die because there's no way to help them. Starving women being pushed in a chaotic line outside a bakery; according to the report, two girls, 13 and 17, and a 50-year-old woman were crushed to death in the incident.

In the DP camps in the Strip in January, according to "Bearing Witness," there was an average of one toilet cubicle for every 220 people and one shower for every 4,500. A significant number of physicians and health organizations reported that infectious diseases and skin disorders were spreading among a great number of Gazans.

Lee Mordechai, 42, a former officer in the IDF Combat Engineering Corps, is presently a senior lecturer in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose expertise is human and natural disasters in the ancient and medieval eras. He has written about the Justinianic plague in the 6th century and the volcanic winter that struck the northern hemisphere in 536 C.E. He approached the subject of the Gaza disaster in an academic-historical way, with dry prose and few adjectives, availing himself of the greatest possible diversity of primary sources; his writing is devoid of interpretation and open to review and revision. Which is precisely why the faces reflected in his text are so utterly appalling.

"I felt that I couldn't go on living in my bubble, that we're talking about capital offenses, and that what's going on is just too large, and contradicts the values I was raised on here," Mordechai says. "I'm not out to confront people or to argue. I wrote the document so it would be out there. So that in another half a year or year or five years or 10 or 100 – people will be able to go back and see that this is what was known, this is what it was possible to know, as early as this past January, or March, and that those among us who didn't know, chose not to know.

"My role as a historian," he continues, "is to give voice to those who cannot sound their own voices, whether they were eunuchs in the 11th century or children in Gaza. I deliberately seek not to appeal to people's emotions, and don't use words that may be controversial or unclear. I don't talk about terrorists or about Zionism or about antisemitism. I'm trying to use as cold and dry a language as possible, and to stick to the facts as I understand them."

Mordechai was on sabbatical in Princeton when the war broke out. When he woke up on October 7, it was already afternoon in Israel. Within hours he grasped that there was a disparity between what the public in Israel was seeing and reality. This understanding stemmed from an alternative system for receiving information that he'd created for himself nine years earlier.

"In 2014, during Operation Protective Edge [in Gaza], I returned from my doctoral studies in the United States and from conducting research in the Balkans. I felt then that there was no open discourse in Israel; everyone was saying the same thing. So I made a conscious effort to access alternative sources of information – [based on] foreign media, blogs, social media. It's also similar to my work as a historian, seeking out primary sources. So I created for myself a kind of personal system in order to understand what was happening in the world. On October 7, I activated the system and realized quite quickly that the public in Israel was experiencing a delay of hours – Ynet carried a bulletin about the possibility that hostages had been taken, but I'd already seen clips of abductions. It creates a dissonance between what's being said about the reality of the situation and the actual reality, and that feeling intensifies."

The report contains over 1,400 footnotes referencing thousands of sources. It details instances of Israeli troops shooting civilians waving white flags, abusing individuals, captives and corpses, randomly firing their weapons, gleefully destroying houses, burning books and defacing Islamic symbols.

Indeed, the disparity between what Mordechai discovered and the information appearing in both Israeli and foreign media has only grown. "The most prominent story at the beginning of the war was the one about 40 Israeli infants decapitated on October 7. That story generated a lot of headlines in the international media, but when you compare it with [National Insurance's official] list of those killed, you realize very quickly that it didn't happen."

Mordechai started to follow reports from Gaza on social media and in the international media. "From the start I got a flood of images of destruction and suffering, and you grasp that there are two separate worlds that aren't talking to one another. It took me a few months to figure out what my role was here. In December, South Africa submitted its formal claims of genocide against Israel in 84 detailed pages with multiple references to sources that could be cross-checked.

"I don't think everything has to be accepted as evidence," he adds, "but you have to grapple with it, see what it's based on, consider its implications. Early on in the war, I wanted to return to Israel to do volunteer work on behalf of some sort of civil society organization, but for family reasons I couldn't. I decided to use the free time I had during the sabbatical at Princeton to try to enlighten the public in Israel that consumes only local media."

He published the first version of "Bearing Witness," just eight pages long, on January 9. The number of those killed in the Strip, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, officially known as the Palestinian Ministry of Health – Gaza, stood at 23,210 then. "I do not believe anything written here will lead to a change of policy, or convince many people," he wrote at the beginning of that document. "Rather, I write this publicly as a historian and an Israeli citizen in order to state for the record my personal position regarding the horrible current situation in Gaza, as events are unfolding. I am writing as an individual, partly because of the disappointing general silence regarding this subject on the part of many local academic institutions, especially those that are well-positioned to comment on it, even as some of my colleagues have bravely spoken out."

Since then, Mordechai has spent many hundreds of hours collecting information and writing, continuing to update the document that appears on the website he's created. Since embarking on this project, he has improved the way he works: meticulously compiling reports from different sources on an Excel spreadsheet, from which, after further examination, he selects the items that will be mentioned in the text. He uses a wide variety of sources: footage shot by civilians, media articles, reports by the United Nations and other international organizations, social media, blogs, and so on.

While he acknowledges that some of the sources are not committed to proper journalistic or other ethical standards, Mordechai stands by the credibility of his documentation. "It's not like I copy-paste everything that someone else comes up with. On the other hand, it's clear that there is a gap between what exists and what we would actually like to see: We would like every incident in the Strip to be examined properly by two independent and non-dependent international organizations, but that's not going to happen.

"So I examine who's reporting, whether they've been caught lying, if there's some nonprofit or blogger who conveyed information that I can prove is incorrect – and if so, I stop using them and delete them. I give greater weight to neutral sources, like human rights organizations and the UN, and do a sort of a synthesis between sources to see whether it [the information] is consistent. I also work very openly and invite anyone who wants to check me. I will be very happy to see that I was wrong about things I wrote, but that's not the case. Until now I've had to make very few corrections."

A perusal of Mordechai's report helps to disperse the fog that has blanketed Israelis since the war broke out. A case in point is the number of fatalities: The October 7 war is the first war in which Israel is not making any effort at all to tally the number of those killed on the other side. In the absence of any other source, many people around the world – foreign governments, media outlets, international organizations – rely on the reports of the Palestinian Health Ministry – Gaza, which are believed to be quite credible. Israel tries to make a point of denying the ministry's figures. Local media outlets usually note that the source of such data is "Hamas' Ministry of Health."

However, few Israelis know that not only do the IDF and the government of Israel not have their own, alternative figures regarding the number of fatalities, but that senior Israeli sources, lacking no other data, end up effectively confirming that published by the ministry in Gaza. How senior? Benjamin Netanyahu himself. On March 10, for example, the prime minister stated in an interview that Israel had killed 13,000 armed Hamas militants and estimated that for every one of them, 1.5 civilians had been killed. In other words, up to that point, between 26,000 and 32,500 people had been killed in the Strip. On that day, the Palestinian ministry issued a figure of 31,112 fatalities in Gaza, within the range cited by Netanyahu. At the end of that month, Netanyahu spoke of 28,000 dead – about 4,600 fewer than the official Palestinian figure. In late April, The Wall Street Journal quoted an estimate by high-ranking IDF officers that the number of dead was approximately 36,000 – more than the number published by the Palestinian ministry at the time. 

Mordechai: "It seems as if, on the Israeli side, they're choosing not to deal with the figures, although Israel could ostensibly do it – the technology exists, and Israel controls the Palestinian Population Registry. The defense establishment also has facial images; they could cross-check them and see that someone who may have been reported dead has gone through a checkpoint. Come on, show me! Give me proof and I will change my approach. It will make my life more complicated, but I will be a lot less upset.

"I think we must ask ourselves what 'bar' of evidence is required in order for us to change our views about the number of Palestinians who have been killed. That's a question that each of us needs to ask themselves – maybe for you the evidence I'm citing isn't sufficient – because there must be some sort of realistic stage in the accumulation of evidence at which we will accept the numbers as reliable.

"For me," he explains, "that point arrived long ago. And after one does the dirty work and understands the numbers a little better, the issue starts to be not one of how many Palestinians died, but why and how the Israeli public continues to doubt these figures after more than a year of hostilities and contrary to all the evidence."

In his report, he quotes Palestinian ministry's figures that cite – among those killed from the time the war broke out, up until this past June – 273 employees of the UN and aid organizations, 100 professors, 243 athletes, 489 health workers (including 55 specialist physicians), 710 children under the age of one year and four preemies who died after the IDF forced the male nurse who was caring for them to leave the hospital. The nurse was caring for five preemies and decided to save the one who looked as if he would have the best chance to survive. The decaying bodies of the other four were found in incubators two weeks later.