Announced earlier this year and opening to the public on 3 April, the Trésors sauvés de Gaza (rescued treasures) exhibition at the Institut du Monde arabe in Paris is set to be a must-see event for Paris residents and visitors to the city alike until its closing date in November this year.
Arranged across two floors in the Institut’s main temporary exhibition spaces, the exhibition not only reminds visitors of the five millennia history of Gaza and the many civilisations that have contributed to it, but also reviews the present threats, chiefly the ongoing war, that have led to many tragic losses of its cultural heritage.
Historically important religious and secular buildings, as well as archaeological sites and large and small museum collections, have been partially or totally destroyed by Israeli bombing raids on Gaza since 2023.
While some of what has been lost is well known, with bombers destroying both the historic Great Omari Mosque and the Palace of the Pasha (Pasha’s Palace Museum) in Gaza City in 2023 and 2024, for example, many less famous archaeological sites and museum collections have also been either partially or completely destroyed.
Only the stump of the minaret of the Great Omari Mosque has been left standing today, with the rest of the building, standing on the site of a 5th-century Byzantine church and built in stages during the Ayyubid, Mameluke, and Ottoman periods, now little more than a heap of rubble.
The same thing is true of the Palace of the Pasha, originally built by the Mameluke Sultan Zahir Baybars in the 13th-century and used by him on his way to defeat the invading Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260. The building was later extended by the Ottomans and was slept in by the French general Napoleon Bonaparte during his Palestinian campaign in 1799. It was mostly destroyed by bombing in 2024.
Among the less well-known casualties of the war on Gaza also referenced in the exhibition are the Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza City, named after the 5th-century Saint Porphyrius, Greek Orthodox Bishop of Gaza from 395 to 420 CE and responsible for the Christianising of Gaza during the late Roman Empire. The Church that bears his name was built by the European Crusaders in 1150 and was largely destroyed by airstrikes in 2023 and 2024.
The site of the ancient city of Anthedon, mentioned by the ancient Roman-Jewish historian Josephus and conquered by the Roman general Pompey during his conquest of the region in the first century BCE, is believed to have been destroyed by bombing together with demolition activities and the movement of military vehicles. It was discovered by French archaeologists in 1994 and excavated between 1995 and 2007.
The site of the Roman necropolis of Ard al-Moharbeen in Jabaliyya, the largest to have been discovered in Gaza and in use from the 1st century BCE to the 2nd century CE, has reportedly been destroyed. The nearby site of the Monastery of Saint Hilarion, founded in 340 CE by Hilarion, a Christian monk, and excavated from the 1990s onwards, has reportedly been either badly damaged or destroyed, with its exact condition unknown.
The site of the Byzantine Church of Jabaliyya, which includes the remains of a 5th-century Christian church with mosaic floors and surrounded by marble columns, has reportedly been mostly destroyed by shelling. The site was discovered in 1996 and subsequently excavated by French and Palestinian excavators. It is considered to be important not only for its surviving mosaics, dating from 732 CE, but also because of the evidence it provides of a flourishing Christian culture in the region under the early Umayyad Caliphate.
Among the museum collections damaged or destroyed in the war on Gaza are those of the École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem (EBAF) in Gaza City, which contained objects excavated in Gaza by Franco-Palestinian teams, and of the Al-Qarara Museum in Khan Yunis, destroyed in October 2023, but with most of the collections apparently safeguarded, the exhibition says.
The Rafah Museum has been almost entirely destroyed, but some collections have apparently been safeguarded. The Gaza Archaeological Museum (Al-Mathaf), a private museum established by Palestinian entrepreneur Jawdat Khoudary in 2007, was destroyed in 2023, but its collections have been mostly safeguarded.
According to a survey carried out by the UN cultural agency UNESCO using satellite data, some 94 heritage sites in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed since the current war on Gaza began. Five Palestinian sites are registered on the Organisation’s World Heritage List as cultural or natural heritage sites considered to be of outstanding universal value and granted international protection under the 1972 World Heritage Convention.
These include four sites on the West Bank, Ancient Jericho/Tell es-Sultan (registered in 2023), the Birthplace of Jesus: Church of the Nativity and the Pilgrimage Route, Bethlehem (2012), Hebron/Al-Khalil Old Town (2017), and Palestine: Land of Olives and Vines – Cultural Landscape of Southern Jerusalem (2014), and one site in Gaza, the Saint Hilarion Monastery/ Tell Umm Amer.
This was registered on the List in 2024 under a fast-track procedure and at the same time was registered on the List of World Heritage in Danger, a subsidiary list of sites under significant threat and benefiting from enhanced monitoring.
There are a further 12 Palestinian sites on the World Heritage Tentative List, these being sites that the Palestinian Government intends to present for formal World Heritage listing. Most of these are on the West Bank, but two are in Gaza – the Anthedon Harbour and the Wadi Gaza Coastal Wetlands, a natural heritage site.
History and safeguarding: The largely bleak condition of Gaza’s cultural heritage is presented in the second part of the Paris exhibition, with photographs showing the extent of the destruction at some of the sites and a 3D film reconstructing how some of them might originally have looked, including the Monastery of Saint Hilarion.
In the first part of the exhibition, the exhibition gives visitors an overview of the long history of Gaza, outlining the contributions made to it by the successive civilisations that have ruled the area, from the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians and through the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Arab periods, and illustrating these with artefacts taken from Palestinian national collections.
As the notes to the exhibition explain, Gaza has always been strategically and geographically important because of its location on the ancient Horus Road connecting Africa and Asia and running from the Sinai to the Levant. Its strategic position between Egypt and Palestine explains its political importance, and its geographical position on trade routes running from Bahrain in the east to Rome in the west explains the importance it has always had for the regional economy.
The earliest mentions of Gaza come from ancient Egypt under the rule of the New Kingdom Pharoah Thutmose III (1481-1425 BCE), the exhibition says, when military border posts were set up in the area. Trade flourished between Egypt and the Levant and between Asia and Europe through Gaza’s Mediterranean ports.
Because of Gaza’s economic and geostrategic importance, it became a target for successive conquerors, some of them staying for centuries and leaving significant legacies behind them and others merely passing through on their way to take control of Egypt. The ancient Assyrians arrived in Gaza in 734 BCE as part of their conquest of the region, followed by the Persians in 539 and then Alexander the Great, who laid siege to Gaza in 332 BCE.
The Roman general Pompey conquered Gaza in 61 BCE, making it first a Roman and then a Byzantine province, though like the rest of the east of the Roman Empire it retained its Hellenistic colouring. Gaza was conquered by the Arabs in 637 CE along with Egypt and the Levant, and between 1149 and 1187 it was temporarily occupied by the European Crusaders. It later came under Egyptian Mameluke control, before becoming part of the Ottoman Empire in 1516 following the Ottoman conquest of Egypt.
In 1917, Gaza was bombarded by British forces fighting the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. It was incorporated into the British Mandate of Palestine after the First World War and saw the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees from the rest of Palestine following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
Some of this long and complex history is illustrated in the exhibition by finds made during archaeological excavations in Gaza that are now the property of the Palestinian Government. As the notes to the exhibition explain, these finds, which include ancient amphora, statuettes, religious items, oil lamps, and mosaics and date from the Bronze Age to the Ottoman period, are being kept for safekeeping at the Geneva Musée d’art et d’histoire (MAH) in Switzerland, a “museum refuge” for these items pending the establishment of proper museum facilities in Gaza.
Some 100 such items from this collection are on show in the Paris exhibition, and they have been complemented by items from the Jawdat Khoudary collection, formerly kept at the Al-Mathaf Museum in Gaza. One such item, fragments of a Byzantine mosaic floor dating from between the 4th and the 6th century CE and discovered at the site of the Saint Hilarion Monastery in Gaza, is on display in the exhibition.
Later periods are illustrated by architectural elements and tombstones, notably from early Islamic sites.
While the destruction recorded in the second part of the exhibition means that some of the sites from which the pieces in the MAH collection come have now been lost or damaged, one significant emphasis is the work that is being done in Palestine, France, and elsewhere to document the cultural heritage of Gaza and to safeguard as much of it as possible for future generations.
The UNESCO survey referenced in the exhibition is part of this documentation work, while organisations such as the Alliance internationale pour la protection du patrimoine dans les zones en conflit (ALIPH – the international alliance for the protection of heritage in conflict zones), a partner of the Institut du Monde arabe exhibition, and the École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem, another partner, are also working both to document and to preserve the Gaza heritage, in association with the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Geneva.
While the exhibition does not have a catalogue, a useful book of essays in French and English, Gaza: Comment transmettre le patrimoine (Gaza: How to Secure its Heritage), funded by the British Council Cultural Protection Fund and the UK Department for Culture, is on sale at the Institut du Monde arabe. This contains contributions by archaeologists and Palestinian and other heritage professionals, notably within the framework of the Intiqal Gazan youth heritage programme.
Trésors sauvés de Gaza – 5000 ans d’histoire, Institut du Monde arabe, Paris, until 2 November.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 17 July, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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