Gaza’s historical and cultural heritage has faced relentless bombardment under the Israeli regime’s two-year war.
Over 20,000 rare artifacts spanning prehistoric eras to the Ottoman period are missing and looted.
“The Israeli army has systematically and extensively destroyed Gaza’s archaeological sites as part of a policy aimed at erasing Palestinian identity,” Ismail al-Thawabteh, head of Gaza’s Government Media Office, told Anadolu on Monday.
Official data says Israeli forces fully or partially destroyed more than 316 archaeological sites and buildings across the Gaza Strip.
Many sites date back to the Mamluk and Ottoman eras, while others trace to early Islamic centuries and the Byzantine period.
Qasr al-Basha, a Mamluk-era palace on a UNESCO-listed heritage site dating to 800 BC, was heavily damaged under Israeli strikes.
Located in the Al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City’s Old City, the palace sustained 70% damage, according to Hamouda Al-Dahdar, a cultural heritage expert at the Centre for Cultural Heritage Preservation in Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank.
Technicians and workers continue sifting through rubble for scattered artifacts, using basic tools to salvage what remains of Gaza’s historical identity.
“What happened to Gaza’s heritage was not only destruction; it was organized looting, a practice criminalized under international law and considered an assault on global cultural heritage,” Thawabteh said.
He said more than 20,000 rare artifacts housed in the museum disappeared during the Israeli war.
Dahdar confirmed the disappearance of thousands of rare and diverse artifacts after Israeli forces raided and destroyed the site.
“Each piece of these artifacts is historically significant and represents a chapter of Palestine’s civilizational history,” Dahdar said, calling the looting “a grave cultural crime that affects national identity and humanity’s shared heritage.”
He noted the site had also suffered major destruction during earlier Israeli military operations before Israel’s withdrawal in 1994.
After the withdrawal, the Palestinian Authority restored the palace and converted it into a museum featuring valuable historical collections.
Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967 and withdrew in 1994 under the 1993 Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization.
In 2005, it dismantled its settlements in Gaza under its unilateral “Disengagement Plan.”
During the latest war that began in October 2023, the palace again faced destruction and looting of its archaeological objects.
More than 69,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them women and children, and over 170,700 injured in Israel’s genocidal war that has reduced the enclave to rubble.