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BEIRUT — Amid the bombed buildings and thousands of deaths in Gaza City is another often-overlooked casualty: the embattled enclave’s destroyed cultural institutions, particularly its few libraries.
Both the Gaza City Library and the Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Center – where a meeting between President Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat took place 25 years ago – were destroyed during the nearly two-month war as Israel sought to destroy the militant group Hamas Rubble and ash laid that controls the Gaza Strip.
“The crew aircraft targeted the public library building, reducing it to rubble and destroying thousands of books, titles and documents documenting the history and development of the city, as well as destroying the library’s language classroom and other library facilities,” it said in a statement on Monday from the local government, which also described the destruction of the Shawa Center and the municipal printing press.
City officials called the strikes an attempt to “spread a state of ignorance in society.” It is unclear when the facilities were destroyed, as many parts of the city have only been accessible again since the lull in fighting began on November 24th.
The Israeli attack, focused mainly on Gaza City and the northern half of the Strip, came in response to a Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7 that killed about 1,200 people. However, civilians bore the brunt of the response, and at least 13,300 people were killed in the Gaza Strip while 80 percent of its residents were displaced.
Amid all the destruction, residents have had little opportunity to come to terms with the loss of the densely populated enclave’s few cultural institutions, which locals remember as havens and rare beacons of culture.
Israel Defense Forces did not immediately respond to questions about the attack.
Photos taken by the community showed that the main library building was gutted from the inside, books were scattered on a floor covered in rubble and dust, and only a few shelves were intact.
The library system included the Gaza City Library as well as a cultural center and a library for children. It was a gathering place for events and a gathering place for students, families and writers.
According to the Gaza Municipality website, the library was established in 1999 through a partnership agreement with the French city of Dunkirk and funding from the World Bank. The library consisted of two floors and a basement. The collection comprised 10,000 volumes in Arabic, English and French.
The Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Center and the associated Diana Tamari Sabbagh Library, which opened in 1988, are also in ruins. Here, on December 15, 1998, before Clinton’s eyes, hundreds of Palestinian fighters voted to repeal the charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which called for the destruction of Israel. The vote paved the way for a meeting at the Erez border crossing between Arafat, Clinton and Israel’s young Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called the PLO vote at the time “a real change, a very positive change.”
“The library was a quiet place. There was a quiet cafeteria and the place was always windy, especially in summer,” said Abdalhadi Alijla, a Sweden-based academic from Gaza, who described to the Washington Post how he began attending the Shawa Center when he was 15.
According to human rights and heritage groups, museums, archaeological sites and university campuses in Gaza have been damaged and destroyed in Israeli attacks during the current offensive. Israel has said that some of the sites, including the Islamic University of Gaza, were used by Hamas militants.
A 2010 survey by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics found that there were 13 public libraries in the Gaza Strip. Most libraries in Gaza are poorly equipped, according to a 2020 talk by Gaza-based poet and New Yorker contributor Mosab Abu Toha, who founded Gaza’s first English-language library in 2017.
This library, named after the late Edward Said, the Palestinian literary critic and professor at Columbia University, began crowdsourcing many of its volumes. Some came from his namesake’s private collection, donated by his widow Mariam Said, and some funding was provided by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen.
There is no information available about the current condition of the Edward Said Library.
Abu Toha said he first had the idea for the library in 2014 after entering the ruins of the Islamic University of Gaza, which had been hit in an earlier round of Israeli attacks.
He pointed out that Gazans face an uphill battle in importing books into the enclave, as supplies cannot go directly to Gaza – which is blockaded by Israel and Egypt – and are instead delivered to the West Bank. In his 2020 talk, Abu Toha described the situation as if he were “asking the head of an American library to travel through Mexico to pick up a package in Guatemala.”
As news of the damage to the libraries broke this week, stunned and saddened residents took to social media to mourn the loss. A user on
Another simply said: “Do you know what the Mongols did when they invaded Baghdad?” in reference to the 13th century sacking of one of the Islamic world’s most important literary centers.
The Gaza City municipality called on UNESCO to protect cultural institutions in the Gaza Strip, noting that such sites are “protected by international humanitarian law.”
UNESCO said it was “deeply concerned about the negative impact that the fighting could have on the cultural heritage in Palestine and Israel, adding to UNESCO’s concerns about the ongoing battles over the state of preservation of sites in Gaza due to the lack of local information.” population adds public policy on heritage and culture,” it said in a statement to The Post.
It added that it called on all sides to respect international law, noting that “cultural sites are civilian infrastructure that cannot be attacked and cannot be used as military sites.”
The library would be “missed by female students who used it as a safe space,” Alijla said. The books could be replaced, “but we also lost a meeting place,” he said.
“The memories can’t be brought back.”