An Investigation Shows How the IDF Killed Hind Rajab

With nearly forty thousand Palestinians killed by Israel’s response to the October 7 Hamas assault, the war in Gaza has proven Joseph Stalin’s old adage that one death is a tragedy and a thousand mere statistics. The fates of individual Gazans are rarely discussed, certainly at the beginning of the war and in the Israeli army (IDF)’s daily operational reports to date.

Among the few Palestinians whose names have reached Western newspapers are the lyricist Refaat Alareer and the six-year-old girl Hind Rajab. With few if any Western media outlets providing detailed reports of individual Palestinian victims in Gaza, it has been left to Palestinian journalists, the international student Palestine solidarity movement, and civil society protests to convey the stories of Alareer and Rajab to Western audiences.

There is no longer any doubt that an Israeli air strike killed Alareer. His poem, If I Must Die, published a few weeks before his death, has already become one of the twenty-first century’s most famous.

Less clear — initially, at least — were the circumstances surrounding Rajab’s death. Her story, which has come to symbolize the fate of the more than fourteen thousand five hundred children already killed in Gaza, has moved many around the world. Street artists have carried her portrait into public spaces; Columbia students renamed a building they occupied “Hind’s Hall,” in turn inspiring the title of a Macklemore protest song.

At the end of June, Forensic Architecture, a London-based research collective, published the results of an investigation entitled “The Killing of Hind Rajab.” Forensic Architecture use data-driven multimedia image and spatial analysis to reconstruct crimes and human rights violations across the…