GAZA – October  7· Wolfgang Tietze

Wolfgang Tietze is a journalist whose work has appeared on the German current-affairs programmes Monitor and Kontraste, as well as on Channel 4, ZDF, SPIEGEL TV and in DER SPIEGEL (1990–2003 and 2022–2023). Years of investigating intelligence networks and researching intelligence archives have given him an extensive understanding of the complex forces and connections at work in the Middle East today.

Immediately after the terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, Tietze began a tenacious search for evidence online. On a Palestinian Telegram channel, he came across two videos and recorded them directly from his screen. They remained online only briefly before being deleted. This was the beginning of three years of relentless research.

GAZA – October 7 follows a trail told through images. Drawing on videos and photographs published across various social media channels, many with timestamps and identifiable location details, Tietze reconstructs how Israeli hostages abducted from Nahal Oz were taken through Gaza to Al-Shifa Hospital on 7 October 2023. He identifies vehicles, camera operators and photographers, retraces the routes they travelled, and concludes that, on that morning, Al-Shifa was not only a hospital but, above all, a Hamas command centre.
In the second part of the book, Tietze presents 17 witnesses from Gaza: photographers, camera operators and satellite news crews who were at the scene that morning, taking photographs and filming. Their images were subsequently published with misleading captions, while the location in which they had been recorded was consistently withheld.Tietze takes the media to task for failing to ask critical questions, as well as the Israeli institutions that never responded to his enquiries. The complete body of documentation has been submitted to the International Criminal Court.

The book is both a historical record of our time and a visual investigative dossier. Routes, vehicles, timestamps, camera positions and the identities of those behind the images are pieced together, step by step, like a puzzle.