There, the Mongols of today have turned the enclave into a museum of massacre and destruction, an exhibition of sadistic devastation, deliberately leaving nothing unscathed.
Since it began two years ago, the genocide has killed nearly one hundred thousand civilians, mostly women, children, and elderly people. But it was also an assault against thousands of years of human civilisation, through the wanton destruction of unique historical monuments from multiple cultures across the ages.
Gaza is one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited urban settlements. Its history dates back more than three and a half millennia.
Until recently, it contained ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Canaanite, Phoenician, Islamic, Mameluke, and Ottoman antiquities. Two hundred and eight of these have been destroyed by the invaders who long deceived the world into believing that they were the torchbearers of civilisation amid a sea of Arab backwardness.
Instead, what those self-proclaimed bearers of enlightenment brought is the destruction of the Al-Sayyed Hashem Mosque, believed to house the tomb of the Prophet’s grandfather Hashem ibn Abd Manaf, and the destruction of the Church of St. Porphyrius, the third-oldest church in the world.
They also demolished the 13th-century Qasr Al-Basha (Pasha’s Palace) Museum, with its distinctive fusion of Mameluke and Ottoman styles bearing testimony to uninterrupted centuries of cultural innovation. This edifice, together with so many other monuments, had withstood the passage of time until the manmade ravages wrought by the 21st-century genocidaires.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 13 November, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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