In the heart of Gaza City, amid the ruins of centuries-old stone walls, Palestinian workers are painstakingly restoring a medieval fortress-turned-museum that bore the brunt of two years of Israeli genocide.

Wearing high-visibility jackets and using little more than shovels and buckets, a small team carefully cleared sand and shattered mortar from what remains of the Pasha Palace Museum, a landmark said to have once hosted Napoleon Bonaparte during his brief campaign in Gaza. Stones suitable for reuse were stacked in neat piles, while rubble was carted away under the persistent hum of an Israeli surveillance drone.

“The Pasha Palace Museum is one of the most important sites destroyed during the recent war on Gaza City,” said Hamouda al-Dahdar, the cultural heritage expert leading the restoration, noting that more than 70 percent of the complex was reduced to rubble.

As of October, UNESCO had recorded damage at 114 heritage sites across Gaza since the Israeli war began on October 7, 2023, including the Pasha Palace itself. Other historic landmarks affected include the Saint Hilarion Monastery, among the oldest Christian monastic sites in the Middle East, and the Omari Mosque, Gaza’s oldest and most prominent place of worship.

‘No more materials’

Issam Juha, director of the Centre for Cultural Heritage Preservation in the occupied West Bank, said the main challenge was securing building materials for the restoration effort. His organization has been coordinating the project remotely.

“There are no more materials, and we are only managing debris, collecting stones, sorting these stones, and have minimal intervention for the consolidation,” Juha told AFP.

Related News

Ecocide in al-Khalil razes seed bank, erasing generations of heritage

Israeli bill uses archaeology as cover to usurp more Palestinian land

Since the start of the war, "Israel" has imposed tight restrictions on Gaza, leading to widespread shortages, from food and medicine to construction supplies.

Although a US-brokered ceasefire in October allowed aid convoys to enter more frequently, humanitarian organizations say every shipment still undergoes strict Israeli screening, causing delays.

Juha said the pause in fighting had at least enabled workers to safely resume excavation. Before that, “people were threatened by drones that were scanning the place and shooting,” he said.

According to Juha, at least 226 cultural and heritage sites were damaged during the war, a higher figure than UNESCO’s, because his teams inside Gaza were able to access additional areas. His organization, he added, works in coordination with the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Antiquities in Ramallah.

‘Memory of the Palestinian people’

“Our cultural heritage is the identity and memory of the Palestinian people,” Dahdar said from the restoration site. Before the war, the Pasha Palace Museum housed more than 17,000 artefacts.

“Unfortunately all of them disappeared after the invasion of the Old City of Gaza,” he said, adding that his team had so far recovered 20 significant pieces dating from the Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic eras.

With Gaza’s history stretching back thousands of years, the coastal enclave remains a repository of relics from past civilizations, from the Canaanites and Egyptians to the Persians and Greeks.

“We are… salvaging the archaeological stones in preparation for future restoration work, as well as rescuing and extracting any artefacts that were on display inside the Pasha Palace,” Dahdar explained.

As a growing mound of debris reached several meters high, one craftsman carefully pieced together a stone relief etched with a cross overlaid by an Islamic crescent. Nearby, another gently brushed centuries of dust from a fragment of Arabic calligraphy.

“We are not talking about just an old building, but rather we are dealing with buildings dating back to different eras,” Dahdar said, as Gaza’s fragile heritage clung to survival, one stone at a time.