Every time a house collapses in Gaza, it's not just walls and lives that fall. A photograph kept in a box, a letter written by a grandfather, a wedding program, a school map — proof that a family lived there — can also disappear. Wired magazine reported on July 6 how the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit is attempting to address this loss with a simple yet powerful idea: creating a digital archive that cannot be looted or erased.

How Palestinians Are Building a Digital Archive That Can’t Be Erased

A digital archive is an organized collection of documents converted into data: images, texts, audio, or video that can be viewed on a computer. The Palestinian Museum's Digital Archive began in 2018 with visits to families in the West Bank to obtain permission and scan photographs, letters, and personal papers. Today, it comprises more than 500,000 documents, ranging from maps and diaries to films and identity documents. These are family memories that have become a shared heritage and a testament to life.

The key word is copy. Amer Shomali, artist and director general of the Palestinian Museum, called it an “archive that cannot be looted”: not because it is impossible to attack, but because it is not dependent on a single building. The project maintains backups distributed across different locations around the world. A backup is a security copy; distributed means that it is not all located on the same server. If a web page goes down, another copy allows it to be rebuilt.

This technical architecture responds to very real violence. UNESCO indicated that, as of March 24, 2026, it had verified damage to 164 cultural sites in Gaza since October 7, 2023. Israeli bombs destroyed historical buildings, religious sites, cultural repositories, monuments, museums, and archaeological areas. In these cases, the loss is not merely artistic. When an archive is destroyed, it also becomes more difficult to prove ownership, continuity, proximity, and the existence of millions of people.

The conflict over memory is not limited to Gaza, either. Reuters reported on June 25, 2026, that a proposed Israeli law, called the Heritage Authority in Judea and Samaria, seeks to extend Israel’s civil control over ancient sites in the occupied West Bank. Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations describe it as a de facto annexation. The dispute over ruins and stones is also a struggle over who gets to tell the story of the territory.

That’s why it’s important that the archive includes more than just state and academic documentation. Wired reports that the team collects materials from families and works with metadata. Metadata refers to “data about data”: date, location, name of the person, language, type of document. Without this information, a photograph remains silent; With them, she can tell a story of kinship, professions, migrations, and struggles. In this case, technology gives voice to those often excluded from official archives.

But we shouldn't idealize digital technology. Shomali explained to Wired that the site is subjected to cyberattacks almost every month. Attackers attempt to take down, steal, or alter information using computer networks. Furthermore, digitization requires money, electricity, staff, translation, and ethical considerations, as no document should be exposed without consent. Popular memory needs servers, certainly, but also communities that decide what to protect and how to share it.

The lesson extends beyond Palestine. In Latin America, we know that a community's records can be lost due to an earthquake, a fire, a flood, a private platform changing its rules, or an economic war that cuts off resources. Archiving is not about keeping dust: it is about defending the possibility of saying "we were there".

https://www.granma.cu/mundo/2026-07-06/memoria-imborrable-06-07-2026-21-07-00

TRANSLATION BY ALFREDO BATERÍANOS

SEE ALSO: https://www.wired.com/story/how-palestinians-are-building-a-digital-archive-that-cant-be-erased/

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