DEIR AL-BALAH/ Gaza Strip
Kneeling amidst the pulverized concrete of what was once a quiet street in Beit Lahia, Mohammed Saad carefully brushes gray dust off the spine of a weathered novel. For Saad, excavating his 35-year-old personal library from the ruins of his home is not an exercise in salvaging property; it is a desperate act of cultural rescue. After packing thousands of rescued volumes into plastic crates, Saad transported them south to Deir al-Balah, establishing a free, open-air library to offer displaced families a temporary intellectual sanctuary from the war.
Saad’s solitary mission highlights a widespread emergency threatening the historical memory of the Gaza Strip. The structural dimensions of this cultural crisis were recently spotlighted on "Al-Makshouf" , a current affairs program produced by the Palestine News Network (PNN) and hosted by journalist Sara Rizk. The episode examined the targeted or collateral ruin of craft workshops, historic archives, public libraries, and publishing houses that form the backbone of Palestinian heritage.
Ibrahim Alwan, Director General of Heritage at the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, detailed the human and material toll via telephone interview. Alwan reported that over 95% of Gaza’s cultural institutions, civic associations, and historical centers have sustained severe structural damage. Concurrently, the generation of artisans keeping traditional practices alive has been decimated by casualties and forced displacement. Individual efforts, like those of weaver Hussam Al-Ssawaf who revived his destroyed carpet workshop, offer critical economic lifelines but remain highly fragile without systematic support. The ministry is pushing forward with an emergency cataloging initiative to record local oral histories and launch a unified National Heritage Register to protect Palestinian identity from permanent erasure.
The literary devastation is equally acute. Renowned novelist Abdullah Tayeh, Assistant Secretary-General of the General Union of Palestinian Writers, noted that the continuous shelling of academic and municipal repositories has obliterated irreplaceable manuscripts and rare reference texts. While praised as heroic, Tayeh stressed that individual salvagers like Saad cannot bear the burden of preserving a nation's literacy alone. He issued a strong call for an overarching emergency commission comprising municipal bodies, national libraries, and global cultural entities to log damages, preserve surviving archives, and plan the physical reconstruction of Gaza's educational hubs.
For the thousands of displaced Palestinians currently borrowing books from Saad's makeshift shelves, reading has transformed into an act of quiet defiance. In a landscape defined by loss, turning a page represents a firm refusal to let their collective intellect and heritage be buried in the rubble.
