The Electronic Intifada 17 October 2025
Gaza civil defense worker Nooh al-Shaghnobi filmed himself as he entered a building following an Israeli attack, to look for survivors, in August 2025.
“Come, someone come with me.”
The first subtitle appears as Nooh al-Shaghnobi, a civil defense worker, films himself inside a building, from a low angle.
In this video, posted to Instagram on 12 August, al-Shaghnobi, a young man with short dark hair and a beard, had ventured inside a building in Gaza that had been attacked by Israel just moments before. He wanders through the building, asking God to “let this not be my end” and filming what he sees: martyrs lying on their sides, covered in dust; blurred-out bodies, identifiable from our vantage point only by blotches of redness.
He calls out, “Is anyone alive here?”
Then, shortly after he finds a few survivors, injured and unable to move, an explosion occurs, and fiery sparks and dust are propelled through the window to al-Shaghnobi’s right.
Al-Shaghnobi screams, collapses and recites the shahada – “There is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet,” which is the foundational statement of Islamic belief, recited to affirm faith.
For a moment, it feels as though you are watching a man film his own death.
Al-Shaghnobi, fortunately, survived, yet he is not the first Palestinian whose survival and documentation have been one and the same.
Since October 2023, and long before, Palestinians and a global audience have been digital witnesses to murders committed by Israel. While some Palestinians have filmed their own killing, others have had their killing filmed.
The assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022 was captured on camera, her final moments broadcast to the world.
And this past July, in the West Bank, activist Awdah Hathaleen filmed his own murder. We see, through his eyes, an Israeli settler raising a gun, pointing it at Hathaleen and firing the deadly shot.
More recently, Israel killed six Gaza journalists during a live broadcast from Gaza in August 2025, as men in red vests stood in the rubble trying to rescue victims; suddenly the screen turned gray from the blast, followed by screams.
These moments are not anomalies; they are part of an extensive archive of documented Palestinian deaths, some of them self-recorded and many more filmed by others.
In 2000, during the second intifada, Muhammad al-Dura, 12, was shot dead by an Israeli soldier while crouching behind his unconscious father in Gaza. Journalist Talal Abu Rahma filmed the entire scene.
During the Great March of Return protests in 2018, a video circulated showing Abdelfattah Abdelnabi, 19, running with a tire in his hand, as he is shot by an Israeli sniper. The footage captures the split second between life and death, the camera holding steady as viewers become witnesses to killing.
On our screens, these recordings arrive with a force that feels unfiltered.
In media studies, this effect is described by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in their book Remediation: Understanding New Media as “immediacy”: the collapse of distance between victim and viewer. At the same time, we remain aware that we are watching through the survivor’s own camera, or through the camera of someone nearby; and Bolter and Grusin call this “hypermediacy,” when the process of mediation itself becomes visible to the viewer.
This combination makes us feel as though we are present at the moment of the event, even though we are encountering it later. The camera is part of the event itself, carried by a body under attack.
The unsteady frame, the rush of breath and the half-formed sentences pull us into the time and space of its recording. We are not watching a polished account shaped by an editor’s hand, but a fragment of survival as it was experienced.
The ethics of witnessing
For the viewer, this closeness generates a sense of urgency and moral demand. Yet it can also create the illusion that witnessing in this way is, in itself, a form of action – that feeling the weight of the moment is equivalent to intervening in it.
Hypermediacy can therefore both mobilize and pacify. It draws us in emotionally, but without structures to channel that feeling beyond the screen; it risks ending there, absorbed into the private experience of having “been there” without ever having acted.
Once a video is uploaded to social media, both immediacy and hypermediacy are absorbed into algorithmic systems that decide how long such footage appears in our feeds, who sees it and when it vanishes. The closeness that once demanded our focus is quickly displaced and folded into an endless stream where scenes of survival, killing and hunger sit beside and compete with jokes, trends and advertisements.
The architecture of these platforms governs both the circulation of footage and the boundaries of our participation. We are funneled into a narrow set of sanctioned gestures – a like, a comment, a share – each one converted into measurable engagement that sustains the platform’s business model.
Within this design, outrage and grief carry the same market value as amusement or desire. For the corporations, attention is interchangeable, and for the states and institutions committing or enabling the violence, it is convenient.
So long as our responses remain in-platform, they are predictable, containable and unlikely to disrupt the conditions that made the footage possible in the first place.
This raises a hard question. If our engagement rarely escapes the circuit that platforms have built for it, are we participating in a form of witnessing that risks reinforcing the very structures it seeks to challenge?
Is there a threshold at which witnessing without action becomes a kind of complicity? What happens when the violence of knowing, seeing and remaining within the safe parameters is set by platform logic?
This is where digital witnessing becomes ethically fraught.
We tell ourselves that sharing is solidarity, that reposting is necessary, that our grief and outrage, briefly visible in the metrics of a feed, amount to meaningful participation in the struggle against genocide. And sometimes, in moments of mass mobilization, digital amplification does matter.
But more often it functions as a form of release, a way to manage the discomfort of our own witnessing. We discharge a fragment of emotion into the network and feel, for a moment, that we have answered the call of conscience.
Meanwhile, nothing changes for the child sleeping on an empty stomach. Awareness without action becomes another layer of the machinery that allows the violence to continue, its energy absorbed into the spectacle rather than translated into consequence.
From witnessing to action
There are Palestinians and their allies who have already stepped beyond these parameters.
In Ramallah, some have gone on hunger strike in solidarity with those trapped in Gaza, refusing food to mirror the conditions imposed by siege.
Their protest is not mediated by algorithms or measured in clicks. It unfolds slowly, in bodies rather than in feeds, and forces a confrontation with the cost of solidarity.
Others take disruption into direct action.
Groups like Palestine Action target the infrastructure of arms production, occupying or sabotaging factories linked to Israel’s military-industrial complex. They are now paying the cost of that solidarity.
The UK government has labeled the group a terrorist organization, a decision that criminalizes its members and supporters and signals the state’s willingness to punish those who take direct, sustained action against the machinery of war.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition attempts to physically breach the siege by sea, sailing with aid and international activists to Gaza’s coast in defiance of Israeli naval control. These actions are not symbolic gestures contained by platform metrics, they are deliberate disruptions of the systems that sustain the violence.
To watch Nooh al-Shaghnobi’s video is to be pulled into an act of survival and documentation intertwined. His words, his breath, the frame of his camera carry us through a war crime as it takes place against him.
But the responsibility does not end with having seen it. If these platforms train us to treat witnessing as the endpoint, we must unlearn that habit.
“Come, someone come with me” was Nooh al-Shagnobi’s call inside a targeted building, but it is also a call to those of us who have watched from a distance.
Breaking this cycle requires more than pity and more than outrage. It requires an active refusal of the passive role into which we have been lulled.
To step beyond the feed is to reject the idea that a like or a share is the endpoint of moral responsibility. It is to translate witnessing into disruption, into protest, into pressure on governments, into the withdrawal of consent from the systems and institutions that make this genocide possible.
The child in Gaza will not be saved by impressions or engagement metrics. Their hunger is not eased by the virality of their image.
They need the genocide to end, the blockade to be broken and the world to remember that witnessing is only the beginning of solidarity. The rest happens after the scroll stops.
Sarah Amr is a Palestinian writer focusing on Palestine through a media lens, with work published in The New Arab, Mondoweiss and Muwatin Media Network.
