By Sophia Harb and Mohamad Badarne
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Jerusalem chronicler Wasif Jawhariyyeh assembled seven photographic albums that document Palestinian life under Ottoman and British rule in nearly nine-hundred images that include family portraits, village scenes, political gatherings, and ordinary days. Yet Jawhariyyeh understood what the authors of Camera Palaestina argue: Photographs cannot tell stories by themselves. Thus, he named the people in his frames, as he was not only taking photographs, he was building a record. Because colonialism has never been only a project of controlling land; it has also always been a project of controlling memory, of documenting people from the outside, on someone else’s terms.
Palestinians have done this ever since. What has changed is the instrument. No longer confined to the studio, the professional, or the archivist, Palestinians have become their own documentarians, recording the texture of daily life with whatever they have. A mother photographs her four-year-old daughter in her Eid dress. A young man takes a selfie in the car. These images were not made for history; they were made out of the ordinary need to say, “I was here, and this moment was mine.” But in Palestine, that ordinary act has never been ordinary. To document is to insist on a presence that the Israeli occupation is determined to erase.
Since October 2023, as the genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza escalated, the lives of thousands of human beings brutally killed were reduced to fleeting statistics on news screens, their deaths questioned or minimized by international media. In response, Untold Palestine, a digital storytelling platform and project of Yura Visuals that had spent years documenting everyday Palestinian life, launched the We Are Not Numbers campaign: a space where families of those killed could share the stories and images of their loved ones. Families came forward with what they had. Photographs, videos, and the images people had taken of themselves and each other became the primary evidence that they had existed, dreamed, loved, and been loved.
The Archive of Life, curated by Yura Visuals, documents the lives of Palestinians killed by the occupation, a record kept against erasure.
But social media platforms have proven unreliable guardians of Palestinian memory. Palestinian content has faced systematic deletion, restriction, and suppression: An image that survived the bombing in Gaza could disappear overnight from a server in California. So the team at Untold Palestine moved the stories to a dedicated archive, documenting each person who has been killed with care for their dignity and the privacy of those who loved them. What began as a campaign became, over time, something closer to what Jawhariyyeh built a century earlier in Jerusalem: a record kept against forgetting. The Archive of Life, أرشيف الحياة, is exactly that. It will launch publicly in the fall of 2026.
The Archive of Life is curated by Yura, a Palestinian-led nonprofit founded in Berlin in 2022 by Palestinian photographer Mohamad Badarne. Yura works with over 200 photographers across Palestine and the Arab region, building a collective where photographers retain agency over their work and its context, use, and value over time. Through Untold Palestine, Yura has published over 2,000 visual stories in Arabic and English, reaching millions of viewers monthly.
The work moves between the digital and the physical. The traveling exhibition Gaza Habibti, has been shown in over 25 cities across the world. The Archive of Life is an open resource for families, researchers, journalists, and anyone seeking to understand the human cost of what is happening in Palestine. But importantly, it is a refusal to let the evidence of stories disappear. Across a century of dispossession, Palestinians might have understood something instinctively: A photograph is not a luxury but proof of life. And in Palestine, proof of life has always been an act of survival.
This article is sponsored by Ghiath and Nadia Sukhtian Foundation
Mohamad Badarne is a Palestinian photographer whose work focuses on people’s tales and the details of their lives.
Sophia Harb is a Palestinian filmmaker and researcher with a background in visual anthropology and cultural projects.
