Investigating Gaza: How the Associated Press Documented the Families Devastated by War

Ever since the start of the war in Gaza, the scale of the devastation has been hard to comprehend.

As the death toll climbed, Palestinian civilians would report losing scores of family members in Israeli strikes. The early months of the conflict were so deadly that doctors had to coin a new term for some young patients: Wounded Child, No Surviving Family (WCNSF).

Documenting the impact remained difficult, however, as Gaza’s health ministry struggled to keep up after the collapse of the health sector and destruction of much of the related infrastructure.

The health ministry’s latest estimate is that more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, a number that is believed to be an undercount with many victims still buried beneath the rubble.

Due to the difficulty in getting information out of Gaza, some journalists have taken it upon themselves to investigate from the outside.

Sarah El Deeb, an investigative reporter at the Associated Press, looked into the effect the war has had on extended families, conducting an investigation that identified 60 families from the Gaza Strip who lost 25 members or more in strikes during the first three months of the war. While “nearly every Palestinian family has suffered grievous, multiple losses,” her investigation found “many have been decimated.”

‘Wiped Out’

In an interview with GIJN, El Deeb says that the investigation was “a long time in the making.”

“We started hearing everyone going on camera in the first week or two [of the war] saying: ‘My whole family has been wiped out,’” El Deeb tells GIJN. “And I said: ‘What does wiped out mean?’”

When Gaza’s health ministry released their first list of registered deaths on October 31, El Deeb started to collect the data, grouping similar family names into columns, and tracking repetitions.

“I picked a random sample [of names] that had more than 10 entries in the list,” she explains, “to see where these people were killed, because the data from the ministry didn’t have how they died, when they died, or where they died. It was just a name and ID number.”

After a months-long process, she was able to identify attacks on residential buildings and shelters that had killed many members of the same family.

Associated Press investigative reporter Sarah El Deeb

After looking at the sample, she found families that had lost multiple members in a single attack, and other examples where particular families had been affected by repeated strikes. “This was repeated in the north, center, and south” of Gaza, she notes.

In the end, she identified 10 Israeli strikes that were particularly deadly for some of Gaza’s extended families. Among them, the Abu Najas, who lost more than 50 family members, including two pregnant women, in strikes in October, and the Mughrabi family, which had more than 70 members killed in a single airstrike.

Research and Speaking to the Families

Information on the families and those who had been killed was found through in-depth open source research on social media networks and direct conversations with living family members, who were usually based outside of Gaza. This required El Deeb to scour online death notices, family and neighborhood social media pages, and spreadsheets.

Although she did speak to some family members still in Gaza, reaching them was a constant challenge because they too were injured, moving locations, or because of their lack of access to the internet or other communications channels.

When El Deeb reached family members abroad, sometimes they were able to connect her to their relatives in Gaza or other witnesses who could give details of what had happened, or visuals or other material related to a specific strike.

When El Deeb stopped populating her table, she had 2,700 names.

The Salem family, who had lost at least 270 members by the time El Deeb wrote up the investigation in 2024, became the center of the story. Youssef Salem, a legal analyst based in Turkey, helped El Deeb with the story, as he himself was attempting to find more information on what was happening to his family.

Family ties play an important role in Palestinian society: relatives in Gaza often live near each other, and extended families sometimes occupy entire buildings. This situation was reinforced during the war, as buildings and homes started hosting displaced relatives from across the enclave. That meant that some strikes were particularly deadly for certain family groups who had taken refuge together.

In one instance in December, Youssef Salem’s cousin, Mohammed, said that an Israeli attack on the family home killed all but 10 of the 200 family members who were sheltering there. Abdullah, a nine-year old boy, was the only survivor of his bloodline after his father, mother, and seven sisters were killed, he told the journalists.

Working on a story that involves this degree of loss, and asking families to recount and give information on the tragedies that had impacted their families, was difficult for El Deeb. While some families were happy to talk and share information, others were not as comfortable speaking about what they had been through.

“With some families, there was one call and that was it, and I knew that there was no going back to them. This is all they are going to give, and this is all I can ask,” El Deeb explains.

But in other cases she would call and “just let them speak. In some instances, it would just be an hour or two hour-long conversation.” El Deeb would stay on the phone, “making sure they know that I am listening.”

“As time went by, I think people realized that it is important, especially the ones that were not inside. The ones in Gaza were a lot more frustrated and busier with other things, [just] surviving,” she adds.

While being mindful of the interviewees’ emotional state, journalists covering the Gaza war can also find themselves shocked by the sheer scale of loss and destruction they are reporting on. El Deeb was no exception.

“I have done lots of really difficult assignments, but the scale and the continuity of this one? I have never seen myself so rattled,” she acknowledges.

Verification

An important part of the process for El Deeb was working with weapons and geolocation experts to verify the strikes. They also drew on data by Airwars, a London-based conflict monitor.

“The one thing that I wanted to be 100% sure about is that it wasn’t a rocket [from Hamas or another Palestinian group], that it wasn’t self-inflicted. This is an Israeli air strike or Israeli artillery,” that led to the deaths, El Deeb explains.

After looking at videos, photos, and talking to witnesses, the team then geolocated the buildings. Weapons experts helped as they “tried to identify whether it was an airstrike… If this is falling from the sky, from a drone in the sky, or if there’s an artillery shell. If there is a crater,” she said. “In most cases we were able to find an exit or an entry point or where the building collapsed.”

Palestinian Civil Defence and citizens search for survivors under the rubble after an Israeli airstrike on a house in west of the Gaza Strip, on November 22, 2023. Image: Shutterstock

In one incident, she explains, it was difficult to identify where the projectile was coming from, until after long discussions and analysis they found an entrance that showed “something came from the top and went down.” Another clue they relied on was the size of the explosion. This part of the process “took several weeks.”

Once armed with the information, El Deeb approached the Israeli army “who either confirmed the location or said that something near there was hit at the time.”

Israel has repeatedly said it is targeting Hamas fighters in Gaza in retaliation for the group’s deadly October 2023 attack — in which 1,200 people were killed and a number of people taken hostage. Israel accuses the militant group of endangering civilians and has said it takes measures to mitigate against civilian harm.

But the AP reported that the 10 strikes they analyzed “mainly hit residential buildings, homes, and shelters where parents, children, grandparents were huddled together for safety… In no case was there an obvious military target or direct warning to those inside, and in one case the family said they had raised a white flag on their building in a combat zone,” El Deeb wrote in one piece.

She tells GIJN that in one case the Israelis had told her there was a Hamas commander in the area. One other case explored the case of a family that had one member who worked for a Hamas-linked charity. “Not the definition of a military target in the traditional sense,” El Deeb notes.

“The big question the article addresses but does not answer, because I do not think anyone has the answer for it, is the proportionality. When is a military target in a home a justification to kill everyone in the house?” says El Deeb.

Impact and Moving Forward

The investigation spread quickly when it was published. El Deeb attributes this to the fact that “families connect with everyone; this is something that brings the story home to people.”

As much of the coverage in Gaza gets clouded by statements and claims from Israeli or Hamas officials, this story helped give an in-depth look at real victims and families. It attached faces, names, and stories to the numbers and humanized the suffering.

Walid Batrawi, a veteran Palestinian media trainer and consultant, praised the documentation used in the investigation, and the message the investigation sends to Palestinians in Gaza. It was an investigation, he says, “that does not consider political conflicts… [was] not afraid of one side or the other. It is about revealing the truth.”

Batrawi added that since Palestinian journalists in Gaza do not have time to conduct in-depth investigations due to the conflict, it is important for their colleagues abroad to do so. He added that there were other stories yet to be told of destroyed families in Gaza.

Due to the sheer scale of the casualties, El Deeb acknowledges that her investigation could not document the impact the war has had on every family, and that her work was limited by her inability to be in Gaza, and the difficulty locals face in investigating sites of attacks due to relentless bombing.

“I did not necessarily break new ground, 60 families is only a fraction,” she notes.

But Sami Abu Salem, a journalist based in Gaza, said that it was significant that an international outlet like the AP carried out this investigation, which helped detail the reality of Palestinians in the war-torn enclave.

“We are not numbers… [this investigation] showed more details, humanized the issue,” Abu Salem points out. “The investigation interviewed witnesses, gave us more details, and got us closer to the event, which is very important.”

Nader Durgham is a journalist based in Lebanon. He reports for Middle East Eye, an independent Middle East and North Africa news site, and for Sky News, covering the Gaza war and its impact on Lebanon. He previously worked with The Washington Post, where he covered the Beirut Port explosion, the economic crisis, and political and humanitarian issues across Syria. A graduate of American University of Beirut, he has a Masters in Democracy and Comparative Politics from University College London.