What specific forensic techniques were used by the UN Commission to verify digital footage from October 7, 2023?
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Executive summary
The Independent International Commission of Inquiry relied on a mix of remote evidence‑gathering, expert-produced geospatial analysis and submitted digital material to verify footage relating to 7 October 2023; the public reports identify UNOSAT satellite/geospatial products, thousands of submitted documents and remote witness interviews but do not publish a detailed, step‑by‑step forensic workflow for video authentication [1] [2]. Independent verification partners and established open‑source verification practices are referenced in the report and in related institutional material, but the Commission’s public documents stop short of listing the specific software tools or every forensic technique applied [3] [4].
1. What the Commission explicitly says it used: UNOSAT geospatial analyses and submitted digital material
The Commission’s detailed findings state that it “received geospatial analyses conducted by the United Nations Satellite Centre (‘UNOSAT’)” and that these products were part of the information package it considered when investigating operations and attacks from 7 October to 31 December 2023 [1]. The reports also record that the Commission solicited and received more than 350 items—documents, imagery and other material—after its October 20 call for submissions, indicating that the inquiry depended heavily on third‑party digital submissions rather than only on-site seizure of original devices [2] [1].
2. How the Commission processed testimonial and remote sources
The Commission states it “conducted remote interviews with victims and witnesses and consulted other sources of information inside Israel, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and in several other countries,” a method used to cross‑check visual material with eyewitness accounts and timelines when physical access was limited [1]. The reports make clear that interviews and stakeholder meetings in third countries (Turkey and Egypt) provided first‑hand testimony the Commission used to corroborate incidents recorded in footage [1].
3. Expert partnerships and the role of digital verification communities
While the Commission’s public reports do not enumerate a forensic software inventory, affiliated digital verification expertise is traceable in the public record: university and NGO units that specialize in OSINT and digital verification—such as the University of Essex’s Digital Verification Unit, which has worked with UN Commissions—and Amnesty’s Digital Verification Corps model are noted as part of the broader ecosystem the Commission can draw on [3] [4]. These actors typically perform geolocation, imagery comparison and cross‑source correlation—practices consistent with the UNOSAT and submission‑based approach described in the reports [1] [4].
4. What the reports do not disclose — the limits of public documentation
The Commission’s publicly released documents do not provide a comprehensive, forensic‑technical appendix describing every analytical step (for example, metadata extraction, hash‑level chain‑of‑custody logs, frame‑by‑frame forensic analysis, deepfake detection algorithms or software used). The absence of such granular methodology in the public report means readers cannot verify, from the report alone, whether or how the Commission ran file‑level metadata checks, used temporal noise analysis, or applied machine‑learning authenticity tests—techniques commonly discussed in digital evidence literature but not itemized in the UN documents [1] [5] [6].
5. Context, caveats and competing claims
The Commission itself flags practical constraints that shaped its methods: lack of access to territory and obstruction by Israeli authorities, which forced reliance on remote verification, submitted materials and satellite analysis rather than full on‑site seizure of original devices—an implicit admission that some forensic avenues were unavailable [2] [1]. Independent reporting on digital verification and institutional guides (Interpol, academic surveys) show a broader toolkit exist for authenticating video—geolocation, satellite imagery cross‑checks, witness correlation, metadata and deepfake screening—but the UN documents do not claim to have applied every tool and do not disclose the full technical chain of custody for each piece of footage [5] [6] [7].