Project name, “Memorial 710” (“710” for “October 7”). Survivors of Kibbutz Beeri in Israel are gathering text messages, photos and videos of the last heartbreaking messages from their loved ones sent live during the unprecedented Hamas attack, in order to build digital evidence of the massacre.
Yaniv Hegyi, former leader of this community, one of the most affected with more than 80 dead, wants to create digital archives of the killing perpetrated on October 7 by commandos of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas infiltrated from the nearby Gaza Strip.
“An interactive map” with messages and images
Clinging to their only source of information and communication with the outside world, “people sent selfies before being murdered,” says Yaniv Hegyi, present at the Kibbutz during the attack. In his cell phone, he keeps thousands of WhatsApp messages that he himself received or that residents sent to him, from terrified people, desperately calling for help from their darkened shelters.
Today, Yaniv Hegyi is imagining an interactive map on which future researchers could select a house and bring up messages and images of what happened there. For example, he explains, “if a 13-year-old girl sent me a voice message saying: ‘please, my mother was murdered, my brother is dead and my father is very seriously injured,’ they (Internet users) will be able to go to the place where the call for help was made and see what happened to this family.”
“This type of collection helps defend historical accuracy”
An unsustainable approach, but essential for Hana Brin, 76 years old. A former historian and resident of Beeri, she agreed to share her messages, despite the pain. “This documentation takes place in real time and on site, it shows great distress, so it is the most authentic,” she says.
A point of view confirmed by Raquel Ukeles, who is creating a database to preserve these archives – text messages, photos, audio messages and videos – as head of collections at the National Library. “This kind of collection helps defend historical accuracy against all kinds of false and scandalous claims,” she explains. “This raw data can be used later by museums or to set up exhibitions,” adds this specialist. “But it’s terribly personal. »
“A duty to remember”
So far, around 100 Beeri survivors have agreed to take part in “Memorial 710” and volunteers are asking other communities to join them, before the precious messages are lost.
And beyond the technological challenge, some are also hesitant to share the last signs of life of a daughter, a grandson or a mother, intimate words of love, spoken before death. “It’s not easy to convince them all,” admits Yaniv Hegyi. “But when they decide to do it, there is a change that takes place (…) By giving us their WhatsApp, they act, they free themselves from this feeling of helplessness that we have all felt inside secure rooms. » We must also use the digital tool for the duty of memory, because “we would have liked to know what happened to our grandparents during the Shoah”.
A total of 1,200 people, most of them civilians according to the authorities, were killed in the Hamas attack, on a scale and violence not seen since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.