by Amal Zadok
The removal of Gaza journalist Saleh Al-Jafarawi’s Instagram account—a voice followed by 4.5 million—days after he was killed covering clashes in the Sabra neighborhood, marks not only the silencing of a courageous witness, but also the latest act in a systematic campaign of digital cleansing by Zionist authorities and their global media backers. Even archived snapshots of Al-Jafarawi’s page on the Wayback Machine, once the gold standard for digital preservation, have reportedly been wiped, fueling grave concerns about a new phase of memory erasure aimed at shielding power from accountability (Quds News Network, 2025; Siasat, 2025).
This event is not isolated. It fits a wider pattern where, for decades, Israel and its supporters have striven to erase the evidence of their atrocities, stretching from physical archives burned during the Nakba to the ongoing suppression of digital records.
The Sada Social Center for Palestinian Digital Rights reported over 25,000 documented violations against Palestinian digital content in a single year, with 31% of these occurring on Instagram—the very platform that deleted Al-Jafarawi’s account (Sada Social Center, 2024).
These actions—a blend of shadow banning, account suspensions, and outright deletions—disproportionately target Palestinians at precisely the moments when their testimony is most needed: during war, massacre, and mass displacement (Advox Global Voices, 2025).
The erasure of evidence has become central to the apparatus of oppression itself. As Sada Social documents, major social platforms are no longer neutral actors—they have become functional extensions of state propaganda, actively suppressing images of bombed hospitals, massacres, and forced expulsions (Advox Global Voices, 2025).
Nearly one-third of documented violations targeted journalists and media institutions, robbing both Palestinians and the global public of essential, frontline information. This systematic censorship is not accidental; it is integral to the ongoing occupation, as it robs Palestinians of both their present voice and their future historical memory (Sada Social Center, 2024).
The story of Saleh Al-Jafarawi is emblematic. For years, he chronicled the destruction visited upon Gaza by Israeli bombardments, producing the kind of raw, first-hand documentation that state media and sanitized Western coverage sought to obscure. His prominence and reach marked him for repeated censorship, culminating first in his death at the hands of a militia linked to Israel, then in the organized effort to purge his legacy from the digital record—a digital assassination to mirror the physical one (Al Jazeera, 2025; Siasat, 2025).
This dual erasure—of the witness and his testimony—has far-reaching consequences. Not only does it deepen the asymmetry of information in the hands of the oppressor, but it attempts to make future accountability impossible. For without evidence, without records, denial becomes the standard. This is not merely an act of censorship, but an act of digital ethnic cleansing—an attempt to render an entire people’s suffering, struggle, and history void (Sada Social Center, 2024).
Meanwhile, while Palestinian content is summarily deleted, incitement and hate speech directed against Palestinians are allowed to spread unchecked. Sada Social recorded over 87,000 instances of anti-Palestinian digital incitement in 2024, often shared by Israeli officials and public figures, openly calling for violence, forced displacement, and dehumanization—yet rarely meeting the same moderation standards (Advox Global Voices, 2025).
This double standard exposes the complicity of social media giants, who empower state violence by selectively enforcing rules. And yet, the architects of these erasures should heed a vital truth: crimes may be deleted from servers, but they cannot be deleted from history. Every vanished video, every wiped account, every stifled voice becomes another entry in a growing indictment that one day will have to be faced.
The stains of Deir Yassin, Jenin, Shuja’iyya, and now the erasure of Saleh Al-Jafarawi cannot be paralyzed with the click of a button. Memory cannot be scrubbed away by algorithms.
The moral record of Zionist atrocities grows longer with every act of digital cleansing, ensuring that justice—though delayed—cannot be forever denied.
To the architects of this digital genocide, know this: Your attempts to incinerate memory will not deliver you from judgment. The world’s archives may tremble before your influence, but the archive of human conscience cannot be bullied, bribed, or erased.
Every shadow you cast over the truth only sharpens the resolve of the millions who bear witness. For every file you delete, a thousand new witnesses will rise. The grief you try to silence will one day be the testimony that convicts you.
You can pull down the accounts, you can whitewash the headlines, you can bulldoze through the digital tombstones of your victims—but when the reckoning comes, history itself will rise as a prosecutor you cannot silence, and there will be no refuge from its verdict nor from the gaze of a world that finally refuses to look away.
References
Advox Global Voices. (2025, May 12). Digital erasure: How social media platforms are silencing Palestinians in 2024. https://advox.globalvoices.org/2025/05/12/digital-erasure-how-social-media-platforms-are-silencing-palestinians-in-2024/
Al Jazeera. (2025, October 12). Palestinian journalist Saleh Aljafarawi shot dead in Gaza City clashes. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/12/palestinian-journalist-saleh-aljafarawi-shot-dead-in-gaza-city-clashes
Quds News Network. (2025, October 13). Instagram removes slain journalist Saleh Al-Jafarawi’s account.
Sada Social Center for Palestinian Digital Rights. (2024, October 5). A Year of Digital Erasure of Palestinians.
Siasat. (2025, October 13). Instagram removes slain journalist Saleh Al Jafarawi’s account. https://www.siasat.com/instagram-removes-slain-journalist-saleh-al-jafarawis-account-3283047/
Wafa. (2024, October 6). Sada Social watch group releases report titled “A Year of Digital Erasure of Palestinians.”
©️2025 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.
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