Recovery work begins at Gaza’s war-damaged heritage sites

Using axes and wheelbarrows, dozens of Palestinian workers wearing hard hats and bulletproof vests clear rubble from the ruins of the oldest and largest mosque in the Gaza Strip.

The broken trunk of the medieval minaret of the Great Omari Mosque and some outer walls are all that remains after the Israeli army targeted them during the two-year war against Hamas.

Since the US-brokered ceasefire began about eight weeks ago, work has begun to remove and sort the stones, but actual restoration cannot begin yet. Israel does not allow construction materials to enter Gaza through the crossings, saying that this is in line with the truce agreement.

“The challenges we face are primarily the scarcity of resources – iron and building materials,” says Hosni Al-Mazloum, an engineer from the Palestinian Cultural Heritage Organization Riwaq. “Then we use primitive tools…and we are very careful because the stones here are 1,200 or 1,300 years old.”

In her cramped office nearby in Gaza City, Haneen al-Amsi faces an equally difficult task, examining fragments of rare ancient Islamic manuscripts she has recovered from the storage rooms of the 13th-century library of the Great Omari Mosque.

“Similar to how we do first aid for people, we do it for manuscripts,” the internationally trained conservationist explains via video link.

Ms. Amsi says that a young man from her department risked his life to retrieve some manuscripts when the Old City came under intense Israeli fire early in the war. However, a treasure trove of early Islamic works remains confined to the ruined building.

Since the previous two-month ceasefire in January, Ms Amsi has led a team trying to recover those manuscripts – funded by the British Council, the UK’s cultural and educational organisation. They started working on moving the rubble manually.

Ms Amsi says that although there were “catastrophic losses”, about 148 of the 228 manuscripts survived. This is largely due to her efforts before the war, working with the British Library to preserve, archive and digitize the works. They were stored in acid-free boxes and kept in iron cabinets.

“Some of the pieces we recovered looked as if they had not spent 700 days under the rubble,” Ms. Amsi says. “But others came out looking like a child had torn them to shreds.” To illustrate, she holds a box of charred scraps covered in Arabic calligraphy.

In recent days, Ms. Amsi’s team was able to use heavy equipment to uncover more severely damaged manuscripts. She says it is now clear that the library’s archives – seen as an invaluable record of Palestinian history, along with many Ottoman records – have been burned to the ground.

The Palestinians accuse Israel of deliberately targeting their heritage sites, which is a war crime. Israel rejects this and says it is acting in accordance with international law.

The IDF blames Hamas for the destruction of important historical monuments and collections, saying the armed group operates “near or under cultural heritage sites.” At the Grand Omari Mosque, the Israeli army said it bombed “a tunnel shaft and a terrorist tunnel.”

UNESCO has verified damage to 145 religious, historical and cultural sites in Gaza since October 7, 2023, when Hamas-led attacks on Israel sparked the war. Evaluations have largely been used from satellite images. Local groups that conducted ground surveys estimated the damage level much higher.

Gaza’s history goes back more than 5,000 years. Different civilizations have left their mark: the Canaanites, the ancient Egyptians, the Palestinians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Hasmonean Jews, the Romans, the Byzantine Christians, the Muslim Mamluks and the Ottomans.

Elsewhere in Gaza City’s Old City, a team of young men remove buckets of sand and crumbled mortar from what remains of the 800-year-old Pasha’s Palace – revealing the geometric patterns of the mosaic floor.

“What is being done is just the bare minimum,” says Issam Jeha, director of the Center for Cultural Heritage Preservation, which is based in the occupied West Bank and helps coordinate the work remotely. “Even to carry out basic interventions, we need cement or lime mortar, which is not available.”

This historic castle is where Napoleon Bonaparte stayed in 1799. Recently, it was renovated and transformed into an impressive museum displaying precious artefacts from French-led archaeological excavations.

“We are dealing with a building that expresses the identity and memory of the Palestinian people,” says Dr. Hamouda Al-Dahdar, a cultural heritage expert who is leading restoration efforts at the site. “We are determined to preserve what remains of this important landmark.”

The Israeli army told me that it had no information about why the Pasha’s Palace was targeted in the war. Local residents say it was hit by an Israeli air strike and was later bulldozed.

Trained workers are now searching for about 17,000 artifacts that were preserved at the site. Most of them were crushed or looted. So far, only about 30 items have been recovered from the rubble, including a piece of a Byzantine coffin lid and pottery.

The ongoing work is creating much-needed employment opportunities in Gaza, with local cultural groups receiving support from international NGOs.

The Geneva-based Aliph Foundation has awarded $700,000 (£524,000) for emergency work in Gaza since 2024, and says its experts are in almost daily contact with teams on the ground.

The British Council says that following the recent ceasefire, its partners are carrying out new damage assessments and safety checks “to understand what future heritage work may be possible”.

“There are many archaeological sites that we cannot access simply because of the presence of the Israeli army,” says prominent Gaza archaeologist Fadel Al-Otal, who continues to follow developments from Switzerland, where he currently resides.

He cites the Roman cemeteries and the Byzantine church east of the Jabalia camp in the north – key sites where he headed the excavations – which lie in the 53% of the strip that remains under full Israeli control.

In Gaza City, thousands of displaced people camping there are denied access to the site of the ancient Greek port of Anthedon.

“We are unable to assess the full extent of the internal damage,” Mr. O’Toole continues. “No work can be done there right now.”

Washington has indicated that it expects progress soon in the next phases of the Gaza ceasefire – dealing with the thorny issues of governance, security, and post-Hamas reconstruction.

While Gazans feel there is still a great deal of uncertainty about the future, the start of work on the famous heritage sites is seen by many as a small sign of hope.

Additional reporting by Malak Hassouna in Jerusalem