”Five seconds please, our lives are more important than the next video.” Palestinians are creating reels, but are people watching?

In a pleading Instagram Reel, Hashim Nazli (@hashimnazli) looks directly into the camera. The close-up shot shows his face from nearby, but doesn’t hide a destroyed house in the background. The former English teacher from Gaza speaks to the viewer. 

“If you skip this, I will never forgive you. I can’t understand why you just like my video without sharing it?” he said in the video. 

Instantly, it is made clear why posting this is so important to him. 

“Please check my bio to give a hand, to make a difference for my family,” he urged the viewers. 

On the timeline of the Instagram app, everyone receives different content depending on their algorithm. For some, this might be easily digestible reels, showing how people bake their newest cookie recipe or do their favourite make-up routine. 

For others, the content couldn’t have a starker difference and is filled with violent content from Gaza, showing the horrid conditions the Palestinians are facing. They appeal and plead for help, ask for donations, and demand that their videos are shared, liked, saved and commented on. 

Why are they making this content? And is it getting Western users to relate and help them?

Why Palestinians are resorting to reels

Since the Israeli military entry in Gaza of October 7th 2023, at least 270 journalists and media workers have been killed by Israel, according to an independent report by Al-Jazeera. The danger of reporting on the ground, the lack of living journalists and the ban on international press makes little room for mainstream Palestinian reporting. 

This was one of the reasons why father and Gaza resident Ayman Elseaqali (@adam_familyes) started posting reels on Instagram. The platform allows for their own content to reach the eyes of media users, without the distortion that they feel happens when Western media reports on them.

This form of media mobilization is not new. Similarities can be seen with the Arab spring and among ”Asian youngsters protesting in Nepal and Bangladesh” said Søren Schultz Jørgensen, Senior Associate Professor at DMJX. 

Sonja Lundorff from the Constructive Institute explains that originally there was a distinction between journalism and digital activism in social media practices. The reels that directly ask for monetary help are considered the latter. But in the context of Gaza, the lines of what counts as journalistic story-telling are increasingly blurred, paving a way for a ‘new kind of reporting’, Sonja Lundorff summarized. 

”Without this type of reporting, we wouldn’t see ‘the damages, the killings, the bombs, if we hadn’t had people on the ground filming,” Søren Schultz Jørgensen added. 

This is precisely what Ayman Elseaqali’s account is trying to do.

“I can share our reality directly – our pain, resilience, and daily life – without filters, and connect with people who want to understand the truth from our own voices,” he added.

To connect or to disengage? 

This wish to connect to humans via such confronting reels comes with its challenges. When showing a recorded video of an Instagram Reels timeline with graphic content from Gaza to students, the main response was disconnect and guilt. The first Palestinian video shows a boy who was martyred because he wanted to get a bag of flour for his family. Following this was an advertisement for Adidas shoes. 

Maggie Quinlan, a master student at DMJX, expressed how the distinguishment between how ”light and capitalist” our world is compared to that of Gaza, underscores the sheer difference of our realities. It all builds onto a strong sense of culpability.

A solution to stop seeing this harsh content is to just scroll away. Some students admitted that they had an impulse to do this.

“I don’t want to see all of these videos, but at the same time I don’t want to close my eyes about what is happening with the world. Sometimes it makes me just want to remove the app,” engineering student Guillaume expressed, when watching videos where Palestinian civilians beg for help and awareness.

This response is not out of the norm, Sonja Lundorff clarified. The disconnect does not happen because of a disinterest, but more so out of the overwhelmingness of not being able to change the situation at hand. 

“I think people are getting a bit numb. They already know the situation is really bad and getting the itch right up in your face doesn’t always help them to act,” Sonja Lundorff said. 

Where all the other interviewed students confided that they slowly desensitized after seeing more and more videos, DMJX student Hussein Ali Kazem experienced the opposite.

“I feel so much empathy for these people. But I am also from a family that has faced war and suffering. I’ve seen it just like this on the TV in my childhood home. So, for me it’s more normal,” he explained. 

Without having a personal background to a conflict zone, anchoring a person to it continuously remains a challenge. To counter this news fatigue, one of the tips from Sonja Lundorff was to engage with communities in close proximity such as demonstrations and unions. 

Between life and death

With the closed borders, persecuted press and no escape, the reels are also a method of survival for the creators. The videos often show someone directly asking the viewer to help them, stating that someone is a bad person for scrolling further.

The severity of the conflict was therefore better understood by Hussein Ali Kazem. When seeing the videos, he notices that the Palestinian creators are directly imploring in a digital space, which he has not seen in the past.

The idea that the reels are a method of a last resort had a deep impact on the students. The overwhelming response was strong empathy towards people like Ayman Elseaqali. 

It is clear that the Palestinian reels are not just content on a feed, but an attempt to create a relation with faraway audiences. They are trying to make viewers stay and watch the content to bring forward the realities on the ground. The overarching challenge is whether these reels are met with disengagement or meaningful responses. 

“We are not just statistics of war, we are human beings, holding on to life and dignity,” Ayman Elseaqali reflected.

Overall, the reels managed to make viewers relate to them with sympathy. But with the overwhelming amount of accounts and the hopelessness of the situation, the relationship is also not without its struggles. 

Investigation methods 

We recorded a two-minute video of Instagram Reels that had a mixture of ‘easy-watchable content’ and Palestinian reels. This video has been shown to all the interviewed students as well as Sonja Lundorff. We reached out to the Instagram accounts that were present on the recorded timeline. One of the accounts we contacted, which was run by a father named Mohammed, had been unreachable as the owner was killed during the writing of this article (@mohammed.ajard). The video can be watched by scanning this QR-code: