The largely bleak condition of Gaza’s cultural heritage as a result of the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip after 7 October 2023 was brought home to many visitors by the “Saved Treasures of Gaza” exhibition that ran at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris until November last year.
The legacy of the successive civilisations that have ruled or controlled the area – from the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians to the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and Arab periods – has been badly damaged or destroyed over the past two and a half years, such that little remains intact today.
According to the UN cultural agency UNESCO, as of 19 February this year 157 heritage sites have been damaged or destroyed since 7 October 2023, including 14 religious sites, 122 buildings of historical and/or artistic interest, three depositories of movable cultural property, nine monuments, one museum, and eight archaeological sites.
Most of these sites – 147 – are in Gaza governorate. They include the Great Omari Mosque and the Palace of the Pasha in Gaza City, the latter a museum, both of which were severely damaged or destroyed in 2023-2024. The Church of Saint Porphyrius was also heavily damaged during the same period. Archaeological sites that have been destroyed include the site of the ancient city of Anthedon, the site of the Roman necropolis of Ard al-Moharbeen, the site of the Monastery of Saint Hilarion, and the site of the Byzantine Church of Jabaliyya.
Museums that have been destroyed or severely damaged include the Rafah Museum and the Gaza Archaeological Museum (Al-Mathaf), and collections that have been destroyed include those of the Ecole biblique et archéologique francaise de Jérusalem (EBAF) in Gaza City and many ancient and modern archives, including much of the Islamic manuscript collections of the Great Omari Mosque and Palace of the Pasha in Gaza City and the Gaza City central archives.
The Paris exhibition contained photographs of this destruction, often taken by satellite because of the difficulty or impossibility of reporting from Gaza, with the UNESCO assessment also being provisional owing to the impossibility of inspecting the damage in the Strip firsthand. Satellite images and remote-sensing data have had to stand in for physical assessment in the meantime.
Valuable as the Institut du Monde arabe exhibition was in drawing attention to the destruction of the cultural heritage in Gaza, it was only able to reach those who saw it in Paris, owing to the absence – at least initially – of a catalogue or substantial accompanying publication. There was a need to present the destruction to the public as quickly as possible without the delays that more detailed investigation of its nature and extent would have entailed.
Even the current UNESCO assessment, released in February this year, completed with the greater resources of this UN organisation dedicated to the protection and safeguarding of the world’s cultural heritage, lacks detail, consisting, at the time of writing, of a list of damaged or destroyed Gazan heritage properties on the organisation’s Website.
The Anglo-Lebanese publisher Dar Saqi has now made up at least in part for the lack of information about the situation of the Gazan cultural heritage two and a half years into the war by publishing an overview of the losses that the Strip has suffered and the efforts that are being made either to salvage what remains or to protect what has survived.
The publication, titled Archiving Gaza in the Present: Memory, Culture, and Erasure, began life as a collection of papers delivered at a London conference on Gaza’s cultural heritage in late 2024. However, the resulting book also adds to these, containing additional pieces by practitioners in the field not at the London conference along with specially commissioned pieces and many maps and photographs.
Written by scholars and heritage practitioners active in the field and from a variety of national backgrounds, the book, edited by Dina Matar, a professor of Arab media at London University, and Venetia Porter, formerly a curator of Islamic art at the British Museum, will be an essential resource for many and a milestone on the road of making Gaza’s ancient, modern, and contemporary heritage, and the damage and destruction it has suffered, better known.
Archiving: Writing in their introduction to the volume, Matar and Porter say that the aim of the contributions is “archiving and documenting the ongoing and systematic erasure of the Palestinian heritage of Gaza in the genocidal war taking place before our eyes.”
While the outside perception of Gaza, at least since 2007, has been one of siege and restriction, they say, creative practice in the Strip was “vibrant and resilient before the explosion of violence” in October 2023. It took various forms, including contemporary practice, with the establishment of art history and fine arts courses in Gazan schools and universities, and conservation and presentation, with the foundation of many Gazan galleries, libraries, and museums.
Archaeologists and historians, often working with institutions abroad, excavated Gaza’s wealth of archaeological sites dating back to the ancient Egyptian period and taking in important Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic remains. Curators or academic specialists established museums, cultural centres, and archives designed both to present new findings about Gaza’s long history to the public and to foster further research.
Working with various international institutions, among them UNESCO, museums and galleries in Europe such as the Geneva Musée d’art et d’histoire (MAH) in Switzerland, foreign cultural agencies such as the French EBAF and the British Council Cultural Protection Fund, among others, as well as universities and national and international NGOs, Gazan archaeologists and heritage practitioners, supported by the Palestinian government, led contemporary cultural activities in Gaza and helped to uncover and make its rich cultural heritage better known.
With the damage and destruction inflicted on the Strip over the past few years, Matar and Porter say, the focus has had to change from such first-order creative work towards the work of conservation and the protection of what has already been achieved and is already known. Archiving is the word they use for this in their book, and it takes in “many different forms, from efforts to preserve personal testimonies in fragmented WhatsApp conversations to the meticulous indexing and forensic analysis of events as they have unfolded.”
“Included in this book is a wealth of visual material,” Matar and Porter say, including “the work of Gaza’s artists before the current war, images of how artists are making art in Gaza today, and stories of everyday lives. It includes maps, images of heritage sites, art centres, and museums: how they were and graphic illustrations of what has become of them today.”
The book is divided into six parts, with the first looking at Gaza’s contemporary art scene. Not presented in the Institut du Monde arabe exhibition, which focused on archaeology, and therefore providing possibly a unique English-language overview of this field, this part of the book contains essays on art institutions and education in Gaza as well as on the work of individual artists and in some cases also statements from the artists themselves.
Among the art initiatives and institutions mentioned are Shababeek, an art space founded in 2009 that also hosts a residency and grants programme, and Eltiqa, an artist collective founded in 2000 that has helped Gazan artists to share ideas, develop their careers, and exhibit both in Gaza and abroad. Among the artist statements included are those by Shareef Sarhan, Hazem Harb, and Malak Mattar, who, in addition to describing their creative journeys, have much to say about the challenges of creating art in Gaza today.
Part two of the book, on archaeology and the built heritage, provides useful accounts of the history of archaeological excavation in Gaza, notably over the past few decades, as well as initiatives to conserve finds and sites and place materials on public display. An important aspect is the focus on the training of Gazan archaeologists and the development of local expertise, such that research and excavation, even if earlier to some extent piloted from abroad, can eventually be handed over to Gazan professionals, with the development of appropriate conservation and training institutions, as well as career paths, that this entails.
Swiss archaeologist Marc-Andre Haldimann writes on these themes in one of his contributions to the book, written with Gazan conservator and archaeologist Jawdat Khoudary and Beatrice Blandin, a curator at the MAH in Geneva. He describes the excavations of the Saint Hilarion Monastery site in the 1990s, now destroyed by bombing, but “a major step in our understanding of the Gaza Strip in Byzantine times,” as well as of Roman and Byzantine tombs uncovered at the same time in Jabaliya, also now destroyed.
He has nothing but praise for Khoudary’s efforts to place items found in both sets of excavations on public display in a private museum, the Gaza Archaeological Museum (Al-Mathaf), set up in association with the MAH. In February 2024, “I received photos and videos sent by Jawdat Khoudary showing the Al-Mathaf Museum being gutted by fire, with all the exhibited objects destroyed and lying on the ground. The sense of total loss was also provided by photographs showing both of Jawdat Khoudary’s storage facilities for the collection flattened by IDF [Israel Defence Forces] bulldozers.”
This sense of loss underlies almost all the articles in this and other parts of the book, though it is also tempered with what Matar and Porter describe as the need to document and archive as a way of resisting the attempts at erasure “taking place before our eyes.” In one of their contributions to the third part of the book, dedicated to museums, cultural centres, and archives, they write on the Bayt Al-Saqqa, an Ottoman building in Gaza City that was restored as a cultural centre in 2013, for example, mourning its destruction by bombing in 2024.
“Along with the Bayt Al-Saqqa,” Matar and Porter write, “nearly every library, archive, and cultural centre or institution in Gaza has been destroyed or severely damaged by Israeli bombardment, firebombing, and looting.” Another example of this is the destruction of the manuscript collection of the Great Omari Mosque and of a neighbouring building called Al-Qissariya, built in 1329, that also functioned as a local market.
“The library was established in 1277 by Sultan Al-Zahir Baybars Al-Bunduqdari,” Seif El Rashidi, Leena Ghannam, and Muneer Elbaz write in their contribution to the book, at the same time that he ordered additions to the Great Omari Mosque.
This is a name that will be well-known to many, both because of the important role he played in Egyptian history – Baybars was the Mameluke sultan of Egypt between 1260 and 1277 and is credited with the defeat of the invading Mongol armies at the battle of Ain Jalut in 1260 – and because of the massive mosque, completed in 1268 and recently restored, that bears his name in Abbasiyya in Cairo.
The archive building was destroyed by an airstrike in 2023, and the Al-Qissariya market was partially destroyed in 2024. People had taken refuge from the bombing in the archive and market buildings, the authors write, “assuming that no one would target books and manuscripts.”
Archiving Gaza in the Present: Memory, Culture, and Erasure, eds. Dina Matar and Venetia Porter, London: Saqi, 2025, pp288
* A version of this article appears in print in the 19 March, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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