Gaza's Cultural Guardians Race to Save Books and Heritage Before the Next Bombardment
As Israeli bombardment continues across Gaza, a network of local archivists and educators is working to safeguard what remains of the enclave's literary and cultural heritage — determined that children will have more than rubble to inherit.
When the bombardment began, Haneen al-Amasi did not wait for a ceasefire.
As director of the Eyes on Heritage Institute, al-Amasi spent the early days of the current conflict moving crates of books, manuscripts, and archival material out of buildings already reduced to rubble in northern Gaza. The work was improvised and urgent — evacuation orders came without warning, and the window to rescue anything from a collapsing structure often measured in minutes. What could be carried was carried. What could not fit into arms or vehicles was documented photographically, the hope being that physical copies might one day be reconstructed.
"We are trying to ensure that when the war ends, our children have something to read other than news of death," al-Amasi told Middle East Eye on 7 May 2026.
That single sentence captures the ambition driving a loose network of librarians, schoolteachers, university professors, and independent volunteers who have spent the past eighteen months doing what international institutions so far have not: physically extracting Gaza's cultural record from active conflict zones and storing it in whatever sheltered spaces remain.
The scale of what has been lost is impossible to calculate with precision. Gaza's estimated 200,000 books — held in school libraries, the public library in Gaza City, university collections, and private homes — represented a cultural inheritance accumulated across generations of occupation, displacement, and reconstruction. Palestinian literary output since 1948 has been substantial, if often overlooked by Western publishing circuits: poetry, short fiction, memoir, historical analysis, children's literature. That corpus now exists partly in salvaged crates, partly in memories, and partly as ash.
The work of preservation has no precedent in these conditions. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has repeatedly called for the protection of cultural property in conflict zones under the 1954 Hague Convention, and Gaza's libraries have been formally listed as protected sites. In practice, the convention has proved unenforceable. UNESCO's requests for access have gone unheeded; its staff cannot operate inside the Strip. What remains is local initiative, improvised and dangerous.
The structural irony here is uncomfortable but unavoidable. The international architecture designed to protect cultural heritage in wartime assumes a level of access that no longer exists for Gaza. The Hague Convention's enforcement mechanisms were built for a world in which humanitarian corridors were at least theoretically negotiable — in which a convoy carrying archive boxes might reach a location if diplomatic pressure was sufficient. That diplomatic pressure has been applied and has failed. Gaza's cultural workers have drawn the obvious conclusion: if protection from outside is not coming, protection must come from within.
What that protection looks like on the ground is less cinematic than the word "archive" suggests. The Eyes on Heritage Institute has concentrated on moving materials to locations deemed less likely to be targeted — lower-floor rooms in buildings with functioning structures above them, spaces in the southern Gaza governorates that have seen somewhat lower density of bombardment, private homes in areas where family networks provide informal security through sheer proximity. The criteria are practical: proximity to a functioning road, structural integrity, defensibility against shrapnel. The aesthetics of preservation — temperature-controlled rooms, acid-free boxes — are a luxury the Strip cannot currently afford.
Al-Amasi's framing matters because it redirects the argument from the immediate and political toward the generational. The question of what children in Gaza will read is not abstract. It is a question about whether a coherent cultural identity survives the next decade, whether the literary and historical record that underpins Palestinian selfhood exists in accessible form, and whether the work of education — already catastrophically disrupted — has any material foundation to resume from when firing stops. These are not questions the ceasefire negotiations in Cairo or Doha are designed to answer, and they receive no column inches in the official communiqués. They are, nonetheless, stakes of the war as concrete as any territorial or security argument.
The counter-narrative — that cultural preservation is a secondary concern when mass civilian casualties are ongoing — deserves acknowledgment. It is an argument made by some aid workers on the ground and by commentators who argue that the language of heritage obscures the more immediate human cost. The argument has force. No one managing triage-level medical care or distributing flour to malnourished families is describing box-moving as a priority. But al-Amasi and her colleagues are not choosing between saving lives and saving books. They are making a different calculation: that the war will end, that the survivors will require something to read, and that the window for physical preservation is closing faster than the window for survival.
There is a broader pattern here that the Gaza story illuminates but does not alone explain. Across conflict zones — from the destruction of the National Library of Iraq in 2003 to the razing of Timbuktu's manuscript libraries by jihadist forces in 2012 — the preservation of cultural memory has consistently been deprioritised by international humanitarian architecture in favour of caloric and medical relief. The pattern reflects a philosophical choice about what constitutes a survivable life: one that is fed and medically stabilised, or one that retains access to its own history and imagination. The aid sector has largely opted for the former. Gaza's archivists are quietly arguing for both.
What remains genuinely uncertain is whether the materials already moved will survive what comes next. The southern governorates where most of Gaza's displaced population is now concentrated have not been spared bombardment. Rafah, Khan Yunis, Deir al-Balah — all have experienced sustained military operations. A crate of books stored in a private home in a neighbourhood that subsequently receives an evacuation order or a precision strike is a crate that burns. Al-Amasi's work is being done against a backdrop of structural uncertainty about whether any of it will still exist when the shooting stops.
The answer to that uncertainty is not optimism but continuation. The Eyes on Heritage Institute continues to move materials. Volunteers continue to document what has been destroyed. The work does not require the international system to function; it requires only that someone is still alive to do it.
This publication's coverage of Gaza has prioritised civilian harm and humanitarian access throughout the conflict. The cultural preservation work of local archivists has received less attention than the destruction itself — a gap this piece attempts to address.