NEW: Bellingcat’s @Emythat geolocates strikes carried out in Rafah after the UN Security Council adopted a resolution demanding a ceasefire in Gaza during Ramadan. bellingcat.com/news/2024/04/1… On Monday, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a date had been set for a large-scale Israeli military offensive in Rafah, despite there being approximately 1.5 million people taking refuge in Rafah, following previous orders to evacuate the North of Gaza.

Exclusive: Today, our reporting on wanted narco boss Christopher Kinahan Sr. continues as we reveal with @ST__Ireland that the Irish Cartel boss’ Google Reviews also exposed others he travelled with, dined with and interacted with bellingcat.com/news/2024/04/0… Last week, Bellingcat and the Sunday Times reported that Kinahan Sr. had left a detailed log of his movements by posting Google reviews for a variety of plush and swanky establishments. bellingcat.com/news/2024/03/3…

Exclusive: Wanted narco boss, Christopher Kinahan Sr, has exposed his movements and whereabouts by leaving hundreds of online reviews for hotels, restaurants and luxury shops, an investigation by Bellingcat and @ST__Ireland finds: bellingcat.com/news/2024/03/3… Kinahan Sr. is the head of the notorious Kinahan Cartel. Irish police believe the organisation has amassed profits of over $1 billion through the trade of illegal narcotics, arms trafficking and money laundering while Europol have linked the gang to multiple murders.

A video titled ‘Want to know where Ammon Bundy is?’ provided just enough clues for Michael Lee (a member of our Discord community) to locate the anti-government US militant, who has been in hiding since a warrant was issued for his arrest. bellingcat.com/news/2024/03/2… In 2023, Bundy was ordered by an Idaho court to pay more than 50 million dollars in damages after accusing the state’s largest hospital of child trafficking and leading a campaign of harassment against its staff.
huffpost.com/entry/ammon-bu…

The Bellingcat team is really keen to share and teach you our investigative methods, so open source research techniques can be used for effective reporting everywhere. There's a few ways you can learn from us... 1. Join a training! The best way to learn is to spend a good few days with our researchers. We'll be on hand to guide you through each research step. Find all upcoming workshops here: bellingcat.com/workshops/

In times of conflict, open source tools can be useful to monitor an area otherwise restricted to journalists. In our latest article, we pinpoint how signs of deforestation from satellite imagery show the scale of the humanitarian crisis ongoing in Gaza. bellingcat.com/news/2024/03/1… In contrast to the deforestation of necessity caused by civilian activities like the collection of food and fuel, the Israeli military is deforesting Gaza and destroying agricultural land as part of its ongoing incursion.

Latest: Bellingcat's @Emythat geolocates the scene of the fatal shooting of a 12-year-old Palestinian in East Jerusalem bellingcat.com/news/2024/03/1… On Tuesday , 12-year-old Rami Hamdan Al-Halhouli, was shot by Israeli police in Shuafat Refugee Camp in East Jerusalem.

It’s difficult to enforce sanctions on an entire region, and doubly so online. In our new guide, Bellingcat explains how, with @_investico , we investigated companies and organisations reacting to sanctions on the Internet. bellingcat.com/resources/2024… In 2022, over 50 digital and human rights groups explained that restrictions on the internet to Russia or Belarus could “hurt individuals attempting to organise in opposition to the war... and access information about what is happening in Ukraine and abroad.”

Today marks two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It has meant two years of violence and destruction for the Ukrainian people, which we have documented through open sources 🧵 In November 2023, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine announced that there had been over 10,000 civilian deaths since the invasion in February 2022. That number will now be higher. ukraine.un.org/en/253322-civi…

Bellingcat’s @KolinaKoltai unpacks how a network of AI Porn sites that make nonconsensual deepfakes have been disguising their sales and misusing financial and online service providers that ban adult content. bellingcat.com/news/2024/02/2… Clothoff, DrawNudes, Nudify, and Undress encourage users to pay for “coins” to “undress” photos of any woman using AI with or without consent. In doing so, they have racked up tens of millions of website visits in just the past four months.

Latest: Bellingcat and @stevanzetti for the @TexasObserver identify the leader of a white nationalist movement in Texas using image analysis and his old band music. bellingcat.com/news/2024/02/1… Rhett Murry Loftis, a 23-year-old resident of Weatherford, Texas has now admitted to the @TexasObserver that he leads the Parker County Active Club. And that he organises white nationalist activism under the name of the Texas Nationalist Network.

An unidentified vessel ran aground off the coast of Tobago on February 7th, leaking oil, coating beaches, wildlife, and over 80 kilometres of the Caribbean Sea. Bellingcat and our Discord community look into the origins of this mystery vessel: bellingcat.com/news/2024/02/1… The situation has been named a national emergency and a week later only the name ‘Gulfstream’ could be found for the vessel. No one has been able to locate an International Maritime Organization (IMO) registration number that would conclusively identify it and place blame.

As the world discusses Rafah, here's some of our tools for researchers looking into the bombing. 🧵Contributor Ollie Ballinger designed a tool that allows you to track likely damage in regions in Gaza, adapted from his estimated damage map for Ukraine. bellingcat.com/resources/2023… If you’re looking for visuals on Gaza, Aram Shabanian shared a useful guide on where you might find live streams to monitor airstrikes. bellingcat.com/resources/2023…

Small arms and light weapons have been particularly significant in the rising rates of homicide and violence in Latin America. In our latest, @SerbinPont writes about an easy-to-navigate database tracking the trends in illegal weapons markets. bellingcat.com/resources/2024… The Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) Dashboard is a geospatial database using open source techniques to track the usage, seizure, and trafficking of small arms and light weapons in the region. Small arms can range from handguns to semi-automatic and automatic rifles.

This far-right group is literally rocking the boat. Here's how Bellingcat's @ColborneMichael used photos from sailing trips and fighting conventions to identify three prominent members of a Dutch right-wing extremist group. bellingcat.com/news/2024/02/0… The Geuzenbond is considered part of the larger Active Club movement, consisting of far-right groups whose neo-Nazi co-founder Robert Rundo is currently in jail awaiting trial on federal rioting charges.

An image analysis by Bellingcat shows an infamous Russian neo-Nazi with ties to the controversial paramilitary Wagner Group may be depicted in a photograph showing a man holding a severed head in Syria...bellingcat.com/news/2024/01/2… Alexey Milchakov oversaw the far-right Rusich Group, which has previously been implicated in war crimes in Syria and Ukraine, including torture and mutilation.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated the central role of drone footage in monitoring conflict zones. @faineg and @konrad_it have created a guide to help researchers identify drone types based on footage. bellingcat.com/resources/2024… The guide outlines characteristics that can help you to determine the source of drone footage. These characteristics can provide crucial insights: for example, auxiliary light warnings indicate an extreme likelihood that a drone is used for bombing attacks.

A short thread on available Bellingcat tools and guides that may be useful for researchers and journalists looking into the war in Gaza. 🧵 .@oballinger built a damage proxy map that estimates the number of damaged buildings in a given area in the Gaza Strip. It also links to geolocated footage of strikes and destruction in the same selected area. Read about it here: bellingcat.com/resources/2023…

Thread regarding recent false allegations by @KitKlarenberg in @TheGrayzoneNews and @beek38 in @AndereKrant, based on a post by @CeesCees72 claiming Bellingcat colluded with Dutch intelligence services, based on a Dutch FOI request:

https://twitter.com/CeesCees72/status/1729600381188018402/

In short: using an excerpt of a single email, they claimed Bellingcat shared a story with Dutch intelligence before publication. We obtained the full email: it shows a bureaucrat copy-pasted the article from our website and shared it with colleagues *after* it was published.

We’ve recently been subjected to a phishing attack via email. The email was made to appear as if it came from USAID and encouraged readers to click a link which downloads a malicious file. We’ve reported it to @USAID. The email’s fraudulent domain (usaid[.]pm), the generic salutations used and the grammatical errors all indicated a phishing campaign.

Bellingcat’s Technical Fellow George Dyer has made investigating companies publicly listed in the US easier by creating a toolkit that helps you navigate and collect data from a free-to-access company regulatory database. bellingcat.com/resources/2023… EDGAR is a free database of corporate and financial data maintained by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but shortcomings such as not being able to download all documents at once from a search and shifting data tags makes it an underused resource.