Inside the dusty walls of one of the oldest libraries in Gaza, a group of Palestinian volunteers are trying to save what remains of an ancient cultural heritage. The library of the Great Omari Mosque, located in Gaza City's Old City, was severely damaged during the war that broke out in October 2023, leaving behind rubble, ash and burned books.
The mosque now stands largely in ruins, its library reduced to a dusty space covered in fragments of manuscripts. “I was shocked to see the extent of the destruction,” says Haneen Al Amsi, head of the Eyes on Heritage Volunteer Foundation, which was involved in the restoration of the collection. According to her, the western part of the library burned down after the mosque was hit, causing irreversible damage.
Of the estimated 20,000 books the library once contained, fewer than 3,000–4,000 remain today. Amid the ruins, volunteers carefully examine burned manuscripts and yellowed scraps of paper, trying to salvage any possible fragments.
The library of the Great Mosque of Omar was considered the third largest in Palestine, after the library of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and that of Ahmed Pasha al-Jazzar. It contained original manuscripts and a rich collection of books on jurisprudence, medicine, literature, and other fields.
Gaza, with a history stretching back thousands of years, remains a territory of extraordinary archaeological value, where the traces of the Canaanites, Egyptians, Persians, and Greeks intertwine with the present-day reality of destruction.
