Gaza treasures end up far from war due to blockade – 04/15/2024 – Science

With its “Napoleon’s palace” destroyed, the ancient Greek site Antedon bombed and only private museum torched, Gaza’s heritage sites are paying a heavy price for the war. But some of the Palestinian historical treasures are not in the region, but parked in Switzerland for years due to the blockade that Israel imposed on the Gaza Strip.

In both Israel and the Palestinian territories, archeology constitutes a latent political issue, and discoveries are often used to justify the claims of both peoples.

UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization, calculates, based on satellite images, that around 41 historic sites have been damaged since Israel began bombing the territory under siege since the Hamas attack on October 7.

In Gaza, Palestinian archaeologist Fadel al Otol monitors the destruction in real time.

He leads a network of 40 archaeologists trained to excavate the ground, reconstruct the past in 3D and preserve heritage. They are the ones who send you images to monitor the progress of the damage.

“All archaeological remains in the north were hit,” Fadel told AFP by telephone from the bombed territory.

The number of victims left by the conflict is frightening. The Hamas attack in southern Israel caused 1,170 deaths, most of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures.

Israel’s military offensive in Gaza launched in response to the attack left more than 33,700 dead, mostly civilians, according to the Ministry of Health of the territory governed by Hamas since 2007.

The historical heritage was also not spared, except for some of its greatest treasures. And this occurs, interestingly, due to the blockade that Israel imposed on the Gaza Strip for 16 years.

State looting?

“Blakhiya [a antiga cidade grega de Antedon] was bombed directly. There is a huge hole”, described Fadel, adding that a part of the site “that we had not started to excavate” was hit by the attack. This point is located near the Hamas headquarters.

In the ancient city of Gaza, “the Al Basha palace was completely destroyed. There were bombings and then the bulldozers arrived,” he said. There were “hundreds of ancient objects and magnificent sarcophagi” at the site, he added, before sharing photos of the damage.

The palace, made of ocher stone, began construction in the 13th century and was known to Palestinians for having sheltered Napoleon Bonaparte at the end of his disastrous Egyptian campaign in 1799. The room where the French emperor supposedly slept was filled with Byzantine objects.

“Our best discoveries were exposed in Al Basha,” Jean-Baptiste Humbert, from Ebaf (French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem) told AFP. But at the moment, little is known about what happened or whether “someone had removed the objects before the building exploded,” Humbert said.

Concerns were further heightened when the director of Israeli Antiquities, Eli Escusido, posted a video on Instagram of Israeli soldiers surrounded by vases and ancient pottery at the Ebaf warehouse in Gaza. Much of what was discovered in the Palestinian territory was stored in the Al Basha museum or in that warehouse.

Palestinians accused the Israeli army of looting. But according to Ebaf archaeologist René Elter, there is no evidence of possible “state looting”. “My colleagues managed to return to the scene. The soldiers opened the boxes. We don’t know if they took anything,” he told AFP.

However, he added that “every day, when Fadel [al-Otol] calls, I’m afraid he’ll tell me that one of our colleagues died or that this place was destroyed.”

Crossroads of civilizations

Situated between Mount Sinai and Lebanon, the Gaza Strip has been a crossroads of civilizations for centuries and an important link between Africa and Asia.

As a center for the incense trade, it attracted Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans and Ottomans.

In the 1990s, after the Oslo Accords and the creation of the Palestinian Authority, Gaza experienced a real estate boom. But when construction work began on these new buildings, workers found countless ancient objects.

Jawdat Khoudary, a real estate magnate and collector from Gaza, then began to accumulate treasures in his residence, eventually owning 4,000 items, including numerous Byzantine columns in his mansion, according to the then curator of the MAH (Museum of Art and History of Geneva), Marc-André Haldimann, in 2004.

His admiration for the objects led him to the idea of ​​organizing a large exhibition about Gaza’s past at the MAH, and building a museum in the Palestinian territory itself so that the inhabitants could learn about their heritage.

Soon, at the end of 2006, around 260 objects from the Khoudary collection left Gaza for Geneva, and some later formed part of another successful exhibition at the IMA (Institute of the Arab World) in Paris.

But geopolitical changes changed plans. In June 2007, Hamas expelled the Palestinian Authority from Gaza and Israel imposed its blockade.

As a result, the historical objects were unable to return to Gaza and were trapped in Geneva.

The museum project, in turn, was paralyzed. Khoudary, however, did not lose hope and built a hotel-museum called Al Mathaf (“museum”, in Arabic) in northern Gaza, where years later the current Israeli military offensive would begin.

“An irony of history”

“Al Mathaf remained under Israeli control for months,” said Khoudary, who fled Gaza for Egypt.

His mansion in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza was also destroyed during intense clashes, in which several objects were missing and the room was set on fire.

“The Israelis devastated the garden with bulldozers. I don’t know if the objects were buried [pelos guindastes] or whether the marble columns were broken or looted. I have no words,” declared the tycoon.

When contacted by AFP, the Israeli Army refused to comment on the destruction and accused Hamas of using hospitals, schools and historical sites for military purposes.

“Israel maintains its commitments to international law, including granting necessary special protections [ao patrimônio]”, said a military statement.

Although part of Khoudary’s collection was lost, the treasures preserved in Switzerland remain intact, saved by the blockade and bureaucratic procedures that delayed their return.

For years “there were 106 boxes ready to return” to Gaza, according to the current MAH curator, Béatrice Blandin.

She said a new exhibition on Gaza in Switzerland is being negotiated.

“The largest collection of objects about the history of Gaza is in Geneva. If there is a new exhibition, the whole world will be able to learn about our history,” Khoudary told AFP.

“It’s an irony of history. A new exhibition on Gaza would demonstrate once again that Gaza is anything but a black hole,” Haldimann said.