Soliman Hijjy
Story By Lila Hassan
Since October 7, 2023, Soliman Hijjy, a 37-year-old freelance visual journalist, has regularly spent hours trekking through the bombed-out landscape of the Gaza Strip, carrying a black safe of hard drives.
The drives contain drone footage, photography, videos, and voice recordings that capture the horror Israel unleashed in his native Palestine. The documentation—including evidence of possible war crimes—he’s compiled is extensive. Aerial photos, taken with his own drone, show the decimation of hospitals, mosques, and town squares. Videos and photos show barefoot people in the winter cold struggling to salvage tents that are collapsing under rainwater; children crying as they suffer from skin disease without medication, due to Israel’s blockade of aid; and children playing with dolls pulled from rubble. He’s filmed interviews with witnesses to attacks on civilians. As a journalist, he has also contributed to The New York Times’s coverage of Gaza. All of his material is obsessively filed away using an archival system he invented on the fly.
Hijjy’s archive shows the history of a place that is no more—and the process of its destruction in the deadliest war in the 21st century. If he died, he said, he didn’t want the memories he’d preserved to die with him. Some hard drives he left behind on a private plot of land, under the care of one of its residents. He locked others he couldn’t bear to part with in the small safe, trekking with it through multiple displacements.
“The main goal of this,” Hijjy told Drop Site News in November, “is to remember details of history you’d expect to be erased.”
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Source: Drop Site News