The ruins, located in the affluent suburb of Nuseirat, in the middle of the Gaza Strip, form a peaceful island, barely disturbed by the humming of Israeli drones. In 2022, some 10,000 visitors were able to admire the ruins of the Saint Hilarion Monastery. Most of them are children living in the exclave, which has been under Israeli blockade for the past 17 years. The site is one of the largest in the Near East and the only archaeological site in Gaza that welcomes the public on a permanent basis.
The religious complex, which dates back to the 4th century, contains churches, a baptistery, a large crypt, baths and a hostelry. It was a place of Christian conversion and a stopover for pilgrims, which was rediscovered by the Palestinians in 1997. Israeli archaeologists had briefly surveyed the site a few years earlier, without publishing anything on the subject.
In the early 2000s, French experts came on board: The École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jérusalem (EBAF, the French School of Biblical and Archeological Research) was involved in the excavations, at the request of the Palestinian ministry and under the sponsorship of the French consulate. French funding was intermittently allocated, before eventually being reduced. In 2017, the British Council offered a comfortable budget that allowed work to start back up. Then the Agence Française de Développement (AFD, the French Development Agency), directly linked to the Quai d'Orsay, decided to invest €11.8 million euro in Saint Hilarion last year.
The project is emblematic of French foreign aid in Gaza and of its limitations. Paris is trying to maintain influence in the coastal territory, bypassing issues that are directly political and going through parallel channels in order to avoid having to talk to local Hamas authorities, a group classified as terrorists by the European Union. "This policy hinders our action to a certain extent, but no more than the Israeli blockade," said Lydia Tabtab, political advisor at the French Consulate in Jerusalem. France is counting on culture in particular to "not consider Gaza solely from a humanitarian or security angle," she said.
"We don't meet with mayors, instead we meet with the technical departments of municipalities," noted Martin Parent, director of AFD's Jerusalem office. "When I come to Saint Hilarion, I don't tell the mayor I'm coming. I've never had any problems. There was some concern about the scale of the project, but we managed to reassure our colleagues in Paris: We know how to succeed with projects in the Gaza Strip."
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