'When It Stopped Being A War': The Situated Testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah

On 6 November 1985, a guerrilla group known as M19 stormed the Palace of Justice in Bogotá, taking state officials and members of the Colombian Supreme Court hostage. Security forces initiated a counter-siege that lasted two days, leaving over a hundred dead and large parts of the building burned. Instead of focusing on what happened inside the Palace between the guerrillas and the military, a new visual investigation by FA and the Truth Commission examines the logistics of the military in their counterinsurgency operation and what happened to certain individuals once they left the building. -FA

Clouds are always double. Seen from the outside they are measurable objects, seen from within they are experiential conditions of optical blur and atmospheric obscurity. Today’s clouds are both environmental and political. Their toxic fog is easily surrounded by lethal doubt. When ‘post-truth’ and denialism obscure acts of violence and compound the harm, we, the inhabitants of toxic clouds, must find new ways of resistance.

On April 6, 2006, Halit Yozgat was murdered by the National Socialist Underground at an Internet café in Kassel. State intelligence officer Andreas Temme was in the café around the same time. An architectural dissection of his police statement.

Since 2018, Forensic Architecture has been working with ‘synthetic images’-photorealistic digital renderings of 3D models-to train machine learning classifiers. Model Zoo includes a growing collection of 3D models of munitions and weapons, as well as the different classifiers trained to identify them making a catalogue of some of the most horrific weapons used in conflict today.

On December 20, 2019, Chilean security forces used unprecedented amounts of tear gas within a relatively small area against people participating in a peaceful and unarmed demonstration. Using open source analysis and fluid dynamic simulations, we measured the concentration of tear gas in the air in that territory to estimate the scale of health risks inflicted on civilians that day.

Return to al-Ma’in chronicles the multiyear collaboration between Forensic Architecture (FA) and Palestinian historian and Nakba survivor Salman Abu Sitta on the reconstruction of his birthplace, the lost village of Ma’in Abu Sitta (or al-Ma’in). Guided by the work and memories of Abu Sitta, FA-researchers reconstructed al-Ma’in’s occupation by Israeli forces on 14 May 1948, its subsequent demolition, and the settlements constructed on its ruins. The movie looks to the present moment and the connections between Israeli military’s conduct and appropriation of Palestinian land during and after 1948, and today in Gaza. The project looks back at the sophistication and sensitivity with which the Abu Sitta family cultivated their land, and the rich agricultural diversity that was lost when Israeli settlements were subsequently constructed over this landscape.

On the evening of 16 March 2017, a US drone strike targeted Sayidina Omar Ibn al-Khattab Mosque in al-Jinah, in Aleppo province, Syria. According to witnesses, the strike took place when close to three hundred people were in the building. Most were gathering for the night prayer, while others remained in the smaller ‘winter prayer hall’ where a religious seminar had just finished. The Syrian Civil Defense, also known as the White Helmets, claimed to have recovered the bodies of thirty-eight civilians, including five children. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported forty-two dead. -FA

The village of al-Araqib in the northern Naqab desert has been demolished over 170 times over the past sixty years. Israeli authorities argue that the village did not exist prior to the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel, and that as such, the Bedouin villagers are trespassers, and their settlements illegal. Since 2015, Forensic Architecture has worked alongside the families of al-Araqib to provide historical and juridical evidence not only to support their own claims to their land, but on behalf of communities throughout the illegalised Palestinian Bedouin villages at the northern threshold of the Naqab desert. - FA

Between 1960 and 1996, Guatemala was consumed by conflict between an increasingly militarized state and a widespread rural insurgency. The state's counterinsurgency efforts peaked in the late 1970s, when security forces pursued guerrillas into the country's highlands. According to a 1999 report by Guatemala's Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), a UN-backed body established toward the end of the conflict, more than 200,000 people were killed or disappeared during more than three decades of violence. FA was commissioned by a Guatemalan NGO, the Center for Human Rights Legal Action (CALDH), to support its efforts to gather evidence for the trial of the country's former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, whose brief military regime lasted from March 1982 to August 1983, and senior members of his security apparatus. Montt would eventually be convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity.

On 1 December 2018, on the margins of a gilets jaunes protest in Marseille, 80-year-old Zineb Redouane was struck in the face by a tear gas grenade as she was standing at the window of her fourth-floor apartment. The following day, she died in hospital. In May 2020, a new element was added to judicial investigation that was ongoing: the report of a ballistics expert, intended to establish whether the officer who fired the shot, a member of France’s CRS riot police, had followed procedure. The report clears the officer, who has still not been identified. Using elements of that report, and a detailed 3D model of the scene, Disclose and Forensic Architecture re-examined the case, reconstructing the precise sequence of events before, during, and after the killing.

Along the coastline of the Gaza Strip, beneath layers of rubble, lies one of Palestine’s hidden treasures and one of the region’s most important archaeological sites. Repeated bombings, and the humanitarian disaster inflicted on Palestinian communities by the decades-long Israeli occupation and siege, as well as advancing coastal erosion and necessary development within the enforced densification of Gaza, have placed this unique site under existential threat. -FA

In the early hours of 9 January 2009, a missile struck the Salha family’s home in Beit Lahiya, Gaza. Under the direction of Fayez and Noor, we constructed a digital model of their home, helping father and son to reconstruct the events of the night. -FA

In late summer of 2014, the Ukrainian Armed Forces battled pro-Russian separatists for control of the town of Ilovaisk, in the border region of Donetsk, eastern Ukraine. By September, the separatists had won a resounding victory, routing the retreating Ukrainian army. Even as the battle was ongoing, however, allegations swirled that regular units of the Russian army had joined the battle on the side of the separatists, tipping the balance decisively in their favour. Russia denied the charges. But, in what became a watershed moment for open source investigation, communities of researchers, reporters, and citizen journalists gathered substantial and compelling open source evidence for the presence of the Russian military in the region. This video is a documentary piece that ventures both into the realms of science and politics (it’s part of the body of evidence submitted to the European Court of Human Rights in the form of an interactive platform).

On 23 March 2025 in Tel al-Sultan, Gaza, Israeli forces massacred fifteen Palestinian aid workers travelling in clearly marked humanitarian vehicles, later burying their bodies and vehicles in a shallow mass grave. Earshot and Forensic Architecture worked with the Palestine Red Crescent Society and survivors of the massacre to reconstruct the incident with unprecedented precision. The Last Responders is an investigative documentary about this massacre. Anchored in the situated testimonies of two survivors, the film draws on firsthand video and voice recordings captured during the night of the attack by the Palestine Red Crescent Society. Through these materials, the film probes acts of execution and concealment, while reconstructing a fuller account of what unfolded in Tel al-Sultan in the hours and days that followed.

A stretch of the Mississippi River once called "Plantation Country" is now the "Petrochemical Corridor", known to those who breathe its toxic air as "Death Valley". Using advanced cartography and fluid dynamics techniques, we work to support local demands for liability and repair.

Since 2014, the clearing and bulldozing of agricultural and residential lands by the Israel military close to the eastern border of Gaza has been complemented by the unannounced aerial spraying of crop-killing herbicides. Our investigation sought to answer the following questions: how do airborne herbicides travel into Gaza? How far into Gaza does it enter? What is the concentration of the herbicide that drifts into Gaza? And what is the damage to the farmland on the Gazan side of the border? -FA