As ceasefire holds, Gazans begin restoring historic fort damaged in war

One bucket at a time, Palestinian workers cleared sand and crumbling mortar from the remains of a former medieval fortress turned museum in Gaza City, damaged by two years of fighting between Israel and Hamas.

A dozen workers in high visibility jackets worked by hand to excavate the bombarded buildings that remain of the Pasha Palace Museum — which reputedly once housed Napoleon Bonaparte during a one-night stay in Gaza — stacking stones to be reused in one pile, and rubble to be discarded in another.

Overhead, an Israeli surveillance drone buzzed loudly while the team toiled in silence.

“The Pasha Palace Museum is one of the most important sites destroyed during the recent war on Gaza City,” Hamouda al-Dahdar, the cultural heritage expert in charge of the restoration works, told AFP, adding that more than 70 percent of the palace’s buildings were destroyed.

As of October 2025, the UN’s cultural heritage agency, UNESCO, had identified damage at 114 sites since the start of the war in Gaza on October 7, 2023, including the Pasha Palace.

Other damaged sites include the Saint Hilarion Monastery complex — one of the oldest Christian monasteries in the Middle East — and Gaza City’s Omari Mosque.

‘No more materials’

Issam Juha, director of the Centre for Cultural Heritage Preservation, a West Bank-based nonprofit helping coordinate the castle’s restoration at a distance, said the main issue was getting materials into Gaza.

“There are no more materials and we are only managing debris, collecting stones, sorting these stones, and have minimal intervention for the consolidation,” Juha told AFP.

Israel imposed tight restrictions on the Gaza Strip at the start of the war, initially sparked by the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, massacre, in which the terror group killed over 1,200 people in the country’s south and took 251 hostages.

International organizations and aid groups have said Israel’s subsequent restrictions on goods entering the enclave have caused acute shortages of food and medicine, charges Israel denies.

COGAT, the arm of the Israeli government that oversees aid flows into Gaza, has previously said it is not limiting the entry of food, water, medical supplies and shelter items and instead blamed aid groups for failing to distribute supplies within the enclave and Hamas for looting aid.

Aid trucks began flowing in greater numbers after a US-brokered ceasefire deal came into effect in October, but each item crossing into Gaza must be approved by strict Israeli vetting, humanitarian organizations have said.

Juha said the ceasefire had allowed workers to resume their excavations. Before, he said, it was unsafe for them to work and “people were threatened by drones that were scanning the place and shooting.”

He said that at least 226 heritage and cultural sites were damaged during the war, arguing his number was higher than UNESCO’s because his teams in Gaza were able to access more areas.

Juha’s organization is loosely affiliated with the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority’s ministry of antiquities, he said.

‘Memory of the Palestinian people’

“Our cultural heritage is the identity and memory of the Palestinian people,” Dahdar said in Gaza City.

“Before the war, the Pasha’s Palace contained more than 17,000 artifacts, but unfortunately, all of them disappeared after the invasion of the Old City of Gaza,” he said.

He added that his team had since recovered 20 important artifacts dating back to the Roman, Byzantine and Islamic eras.

Gaza’s history stretches back thousands of years, making the enclave a treasure trove of archaeological artifacts from past civilizations, including Canaanites, Egyptians, Persians and Greeks.

“We are… salvaging the archaeological stones in preparation for future restoration work, as well as rescuing and extracting any artifacts that were on display inside the Pasha Palace,” Dahdar said.

As the pile of excavated rubble already several meters high grew, one craftsman carefully restored a piece of stonework bearing a cross mounted with an Islamic crescent. Another delicately brushed the dust off stonework bearing Islamic calligraphy.

“We are not talking about just an old building, but rather we are dealing with buildings dating back to different eras,” said Dahdar.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.