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Hamouda al-Dahda stands in the ruins of Pasha Palace in Gaza City, where before the war the golden limestone walls of the 800-year-old building towered above him, the gardens shaded visitors, and the cool vaulted halls held hundreds of priceless historical artefacts.
“The palace was like a small paradise on Earth. Now, there is no life here at all and anyone who comes is sad. They can remember what it once was,” the 40-year-old museum director says.
There is little left of the palace – a mansion and fortress during Mamluk and Ottoman rule over Gaza and where Napoleon Bonaparte once spent several nights. Israeli bombardment and fighting in Gaza City during late 2023 and early 2024 left just a few sections of wall and an arch standing. Almost nothing remains of the museum.
For Dahda, the loss is personal too. He had not wanted to leave the palace and so did not join hundreds of thousands of others fleeing to the south of Gaza when war broke out. In December 2023, he was staying with his wife and three daughters nearby when there was a huge explosion.
“All my close family members were pulled out from under the rubble injured, except for my daughter Mervat, 12 years old, who was pulled out as a lifeless body. May God have mercy on her,” he says.
Pasha Palace is one of dozens of major heritage sites destroyed or badly damaged in the war in Gaza, which was triggered by a Hamas surprise raid into southern Israel in October 2023 in which 1,200 people were killed, mostly civilians, and 251 abducted. The death toll from the Israeli offensive that followed reached more than 48,000 people, also mostly civilians, before a fragile ceasefire came into effect in January 2025.
The offensive devastated Gaza, leaving fewer than a 10th of homes untouched, and destroying sanitation systems, health facilities, schools, universities, roads and much else.
Palestinian experts working with British archaeologists estimate that more than two-thirds of heritage, cultural and archaeological sites in Gaza have been damaged, often very badly.
Many appear to have been directly targeted by Israeli forces in attacks that could constitute war crimes in some circumstances. Israeli officials have said cultural monuments such as the Pasha Palace were only ever attacked if used by Hamas for military purposes and deny accusations that such sites were deliberately targeted for destruction.
Close to Pasha Palace is Hamam al-Samara, a 700-year-old bath house that was among the most important of Gaza’s monuments. Its guardian was Salim al-Wazir, 74, who spent the war in southern Gaza living in tents.
Al-Wazir took over management of the bath house in 1970 from his father, whose own father had rented it from a famous family of Gaza notables during the era of Ottoman rule.
“On the first day we could return to the north of Gaza from where we had been sheltering, I didn’t go to my home but instead came first to check on the hamam,” he says.
Wazir was stunned. The hamam had been almost entirely destroyed.
“I lost a place that meant a lot to me, a place that gathered people and provided them with comfort and relaxation. I also lost a part of my family’s history and of course of Gaza’s collective memory,” he says.
A recent report by Palestinian conservation experts in the occupied West Bank and UK-based archaeologists estimated that just protecting historical sites from further damage in Gaza – if the current ceasefire holds – will cost about $33m and take up to 18 months. Full reconstruction could cost almost 10 times more and take up to eight years.
Competing proposals for the reconstruction of Gaza have paid little attention to historical sites. Donald Trump proposed levelling the territory after displacing its inhabitants to build a “Riviera of the Middle East”. Others look to cities such as Dubai for inspiration, with a focus on towering hotels and malls, not heritage.
But many in Gaza City want a different future for even the most badly damaged historical buildings, calling for their protection and eventual reconstruction.
“If no one else takes on the task, I will spend the rest of my life rebuilding [the Hamam al-Samara] myself,” says Wazir. “I think we can reconstruct it exactly as it was, using the same stones and design. That way we can restore its former spirit.”
Experts also point to bombed Roman and Greek remains, as well as bulldozed historical cemeteries, to underline the cultural richness that is still potentially at risk of further damage – either from a return to war or clumsy reconstruction.
Many residents see the al-Omari mosque, the oldest and largest in the territory, as the greatest potential loss. The building was originally a Byzantine church, then was converted into a mosque after the Islamic conquest of Palestine almost 1,400 years ago. It was expanded over the centuries and rebuilt once after being almost destroyed by British artillery targeting an Ottoman ammunition dump there.
Historians point to the mosque, along with a Roman port and other sites, as evidence of the importance of Gaza as a thriving trading centre for 2,000 years.
Tarek Haniya, 60, had been working at the mosque as a tour guide since his youth.
“I have lived my life in Gaza, next to the mosque. The war was harsh in every sense of the word. Every day felt like a new nightmare. I lost my friends, I lost family members, I lost my home that had sheltered me for decades, and I lost the Omari mosque as I knew it too,” he says.
Though the mosque’s famous Mamluk-era wooden pulpit has survived almost undamaged, much of its roof is gone, most walls are in ruins and the minaret partly toppled.
“It will definitely be restored. In fact, we are already working on that. There is a team collecting the broken stones of the mosque to restore it as soon as possible. True, the old mosque held irreplaceable history within its walls, but we will rebuild it.”
