Until 2024, the objects on display in “Trésors sauvés de Gaza” (“Treasures Saved from Gaza”), an exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris that closed last December, had been sitting in crates in Geneva for seventeen years awaiting their return to the Gaza Strip, where they were destined for a museum not yet built. More than five hundred items were “ready for departure,” as the show’s curators put it in an introductory text: a Roman jar with a human face, pieces of Byzantine columns, a lintel with sumptuous leaves.

Many of them—some 260—came from the collection of a businessman named Jawdat Khoudary, a construction company owner in Gaza City who would set aside artifacts his team found as they built. (Later he expanded his holdings with purchases.) In the fall of 2006 he shipped hundreds of items to the Geneva Museum of Art for an exhibition, hoping for their prompt return. But the following year, after its victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections, Hamas took over the Strip and Israel imposed a blockade. Caught in a diplomatic tangle between Switzerland, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel, the art remained in a freeport in Geneva. Khoudary tried repeatedly to get his collection back, as he told the Swiss paper Le Temps in 2019. But the pieces stayed in exile.

In 2008 Khoudary opened a museum of his own in the north of Gaza City. “The idea is to show our deep roots from many cultures in Gaza,” he told The New York Times at the opening. “It’s important that people realize we had a good civilization in the past.” Only six months later, an exchange of air strikes between Israel and Hamas broke ceramics and amphorae in the collection. “Maybe I made a mistake when I established this museum,” he told Archaeology Magazine. At the beginning of Israel’s bombing campaign in 2023 the museum sustained heavy damage. Videos circulating in early 2024 show burnt stone and lonely columns; the show’s curators relate that four thousand pieces are missing or destroyed.

The fate of Khoudary’s collection was all too common. Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed over 70,000 people and destroyed most of the Strip’s buildings, farmland, and health infrastructure, has not spared Palestinian cultural patrimony. As of January 20, 2026, according to UNESCO, 150 world heritage sites in Gaza had sustained damage since the start of the war, including mosques, churches, monuments, and repositories of archaeological remains. “Trésors sauvés de Gaza,” which presented 123 works from those crates in Geneva, was both a preview of what a future museum of Gazan history might look like and a reminder of everything it will not contain. As world powers debate Gaza’s future, the show asks, what will remain of its past?

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Gaza City stands at the crossroads between Egypt and Asia, at once a port city and the last bastion on the border of the desert. The area has been inhabited since at least the Bronze Age, and it had strong ties to Egypt from early on. Among the show’s oldest pieces is a small frog figurine from around 3000 BCE, a rare representation of a humble creature from a period when the region’s art mainly depicted larger, domesticated animals. It looks wound up, ready to jump.

Gaza City itself likely dates from the third millennium BCE. By the time of the reign of Thutmose III in the fifteenth century BCE it was functioning as its own kingdom, overseen by an Egyptian royal agent, under the name “Hazzatu.” The centuries that followed brought a series of conquests: in 734 BCE by the Assyrians, two hundred years later by the Persian Cyrus, and later still by Alexander of Macedon. Alexander’s conquest and siege were so brutal that much of the city was rebuilt in a Greek style. Conquest again: in 97 BCE the Jewish Hasmonean kingdom destroyed the city and left it abandoned. Thirty years later the Greeks returned under Pompey and built a theater, a hippodrome, and a stadium. The Hellenistic art in the show hints at their cultural dominance: one fragment of a red-figure vase shows a dog and a panther about to swat each other; in another a young man parts his lips slightly, as if in surprise.

“Trésors sauvés de Gaza” stressed how variegated the history of Gaza has been, how many cultures met there. Many of the exhibition’s objects testify to the city’s central place in trade routes. A set of rings found along the coast date from anytime between the fifth century BCE and the fifth century CE. (They would have likely held the cable linked to a ship’s anchor.) One hefty item, which likely fell from a shipwrecked vessel off the Gazan port of Anthedon, consists of some 20,000 pieces of silver, weighing about seventy pounds, forever fused together in the shape of the leather pouch that held them. A beautiful statue, maybe of Aphrodite or Hecate, might come from the Roman period, or the Greek. She stands cockily, her hip out to one side, her curves covered by a thin gauze carved delicately in the marble. 

During the Byzantine period Gaza was known for its rhetorical school—a group of scholars who melded Christian learning with Hellenistic oratory traditions—and for its heavily decorated churches. In the late 1990s a construction crew discovered the remains of a Byzantine church complex in Jabalia, in North Gaza, with inscriptions dating to 444 CE and rich mosaics. The show included a floor mosaic from another Byzantine-era church, so detailed it seems almost embroidered with local fauna and flora: a dog wearing a collar, a rooster, what looks like a giraffe.

Byzantine rule lasted until the mid-seventh century, when Gaza was conquered by Muslim armies. The city became a pilgrimage center; rumors claimed that it contained the tomb of Mohammed’s grandfather. In the twelfth century the crusaders occupied the city and built a large church, which became the Omari Mosque—also known as the Great Mosque of Gaza—after Saladin’s armies retook the area in 1187. Capitals and engraved columns were preserved and reused as the building’s function changed. Israeli forces bombed the mosque in December 2023, leaving only a shattered minaret.

“The new Gaza is today a remarkable city of Palestine, twice as large as Jerusalem, crowded and rich,” the Swiss Dominican monk Félix Fabri wrote when he crossed Gaza in the fifteenth century, by which point it had been conquered by the Mamluk Dynasty. He noted that merchandise was plentiful and cheap, and the people peaceful. The city kept growing after it fell under Ottoman control in 1516: a fragment of a funerary stele from sometime between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries praises a merciful God in blocky, geometric Arabic script.

In the basement of the Institut du Monde Arabe, the displaced pieces of this centuries-long history sat on wheeled tables that resembled storage carts; even the benches had wheels. The labels were simple, with no translation from the French and relatively little information. The first time I went I found it hard to see what I was looking at amid the dark lighting and large crowds. Only when I returned one morning did I feel I could take in the objects and understand the history that connected them.

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It’s frustrating how little we know about some of these artifacts. As the curator Élodie Bouffard notes in the catalog she coedited with the archaeologist René Elter for the exhibition, Gaza’s ancient heritage has long been understudied. Archaeological efforts started there in 1879 with a “happy accident,” Bouffard writes, when a peasant found a thirteen-foot-tall statue of Zeus peeping out of a pile of sand. (Now the statue looms over visitors to the Istanbul Archaeological Museum.) But the nineteenth-century rush of archaeologists in the Middle East mainly ignored Gaza, which preserved few relics of Biblical history.

During World War I, British bombs destroyed many of the older buildings; a picture taken three years later shows a Byzantine column up to its leafy capital in rubble. The British left their mark in other ways. The show exhibits another Byzantine column reused in 1917 to commemorate the death of a Bengal Lancer, Fas Lansdowne, his name inscribed in the marble. Later the area suffered further neglect due to its proximity to Egypt, where digs were uncovering the vast empires of the pharaohs.

Since 1994 teams of French and Palestinian archaeologists have been working to excavate more of the city’s past; in 2017 a French nonprofit started an initiative called Intiqal with the aim of training young students in the Strip to care for their cultural heritage. A second room of the exhibition focused on the many ways Gaza’s patrimony has been destroyed in the past hundred years, contrasting images from the early twentieth century with a display about the damage done to Gazan monuments by successive Israeli attacks. A picture from 1922 shows the Church of Saint Porphyrius, then the seat of the Greek Parish. Men wearing dark clothes gather around another man, perhaps a priest, dressed in white. The church was built in 1150, named after the saint who led efforts to convert Gazans in the fourth century. On October 19, 2023, an Israeli airstrike hit a building in the compound, killing eighteen people. 

Many of the works preserved in the show carry the record of Gaza’s continued misfortunes. The forced displacement of Palestinians from what became the state of Israel after 1948, known as the Nakba, added 120,000 people to the Strip’s population. Rapid construction projects to mitigate the overcrowding tore through the area’s many layers of history. In 2016, Elter writes in the catalog, “the rests of an important building that might have been, according to the elements found, a great church of the Byzantine period disappeared during the creation of the foundations of a mall.” 

Israel’s many wars in the Strip did their own damage: in 2014 bombing harmed dozens of sites. But the destruction of the past three years is unprecedented. The Pasha Palace Museum—a building where Napoleon once stayed, parts of which had been built in the thirteenth century—was destroyed by Israeli strikes. So was the Rafah Museum, although Palestinians on the ground worked with a Swiss foundation called ALIPH to rescue a number of the items in its collection. The Ard-al-Moharbeen Roman necropolis, in the north of the Strip, had been discovered in 2022; 125 tombs had been unearthed before the start of the war. According to the BBC, Israel’s ground campaign left it “damaged and bulldozed.” The IDF said it had “targeted ‘a Hamas military compound used for operational purposes.’” 

An article in Le Mondelast fall described how, this past September, the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem—where Elter works—learned that Israeli forces planned to bomb the institution’s depot in the Strip. They hired trucks and filled them with artifacts, about 70 percent of the total. The trucks had to be open so the army could see inside, and as they drove through Gaza City artifacts kept falling off the vehicle onto the earth. Three days later the depot building was bombed; photographs show shattered pieces on the floor. “Our scientific work,” Elter told the reporter, “has now become the memory of Gaza.”