“The occupation planes targeted and turned the public library building into rubble and destroyed thousands of books, titles and documents recording the city’s history and development, as well as the destruction of the library’s language courses hall and other library facilities,” said a statement Monday from the local government, which also described the destruction of the Shawa center and the municipal printing press.
The municipal authorities called the strikes an attempt “to spread a state of ignorance in society.” It is unclear when the institutions were destroyed, as it has only been since the pause in fighting began on Nov. 24 that many parts of the city have become accessible again.
The Israeli assault, which has mainly focused on Gaza City and the northern half of the strip, came in response to a Hamas attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7 that left about 1,200 people dead. Civilians, however, have borne the brunt of the response, and at least 13,300 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip, while 80 percent of its inhabitants have been displaced.
Amid all the destruction, residents have barely had the opportunity to grapple with the loss of the densely populated enclave’s few cultural institutions that locals recall as refuges and rare beacons of culture.
The Israel Defense Forces did not reply to questions about the strike.
Photos taken by the municipality showed the main library building gutted from the inside, with books scattered on a floor covered with debris and dust, and few shelves intact.
The library system included the Gaza Municipal Library as well as a cultural center and a library for children. It was a gathering space for events and a venue for students, families and writers.
According to the Gaza municipality’s website, the library was founded in 1999 through a twinning agreement with the French city of Dunkirk and funding from the World Bank. The library consisted of two floors and a basement. Its holdings included 10,000 volumes in Arabic, English and French.
The Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Center and its accompanying Diana Tamari Sabbagh Library, which opened in 1988, also lies in ruins. It was here that on Dec. 15, 1998, with Clinton looking on, that hundreds of Palestinian fighters voted to remove the Palestine Liberation Organization’s charter of clauses calling for the destruction of Israel. The vote paved the way for a meeting at the Erez crossing between Arafat, Clinton and Israel’s young prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who at the time described the PLO vote as “a real change, a very positive change.”
“The library was a calm place. It had a quiet cafeteria and the place was always breezy, especially in the summer,” said Abdalhadi Alijla, a Sweden-based academic from Gaza who described to The Washington Post how he started frequenting the Shawa center when he was 15.
Museums, archaeological heritage sites and university campuses in Gaza have all been damaged and destroyed in Israeli attacks during the current offensive, according to human rights and cultural heritage groups. Israel has said some of the sites, including the Islamic University of Gaza, were used by Hamas operatives.
A 2010 survey by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics found that there are 13 public libraries operating in the Gaza Strip. Most of the libraries in Gaza are poorly equipped, according to a 2020 talk by Gaza-based poet and New Yorker contributor Mosab Abu Toha, who founded the first English-language library in Gaza in 2017.
That library, named in honor of the late Edward Said, the Palestinian literary critic and Columbia University professor, began by crowdsourcing many of its volumes. Some were from the private collection of its namesake, donated by his widow, Mariam Said, and some funding was received from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen.
There has been no information about the current condition of the Edward Said Library.
Abu Toha said he first had the idea for the library in 2014, after walking into the ruins of the Islamic University of Gaza, which was hit during a previous round of Israeli strikes.
He noted that Gazans face an uphill battle in importing books into the enclave, as shipments cannot go straight 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 “asking the head of an American library to travel through Mexico to pick up a parcel in Guatemala.”
As news circulated this week of the damage to the libraries, stunned and saddened residents took to social media to mourn the loss. One user on X with the name of Gazabibliophile wrote: “Many memories and eternal friendships I’ve lived with in the Gaza Public Library!”
Another simply said, “Do you know what the Mongols did when they invaded Baghdad?” in a reference to the sacking in the 13th century of one of the Islamic world’s preeminent literary centers.
The Gaza City municipality called on UNESCO to protect Gaza’s cultural institutions, noting that such places are “protected under international humanitarian law.”
UNESCO said it was “deeply concerned about the adverse impact that fighting could have on any cultural heritage in Palestine and Israel, which comes in addition to UNESCO’s concerns before the ongoing fighting about the state of conservation of sites in Gaza due to the lack of local public policies on heritage and culture,” in a statement to The Post.
It added that it has urged all sides to respect international law, noting that “cultural sites are civilian infrastructure that cannot be targeted 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 place of gathering,” he said.
“The memories cannot be brought back.”
