A day before launching a ground offensive in Gaza City, Israeli officials issued a cryptic statement about the safe transfer of rare archaeological artifacts associated with the Christian community there. Accompanying Monday’s announcement were images of a storeroom lined with historical finds and boxes being loaded onto trucks.
Left out of the statement was the back story: how French officials and the Vatican had raced to save the objects after the Israeli military warned of its plans to bomb a building containing the warehouse of the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem, which has been excavating in the region since 1890.
In a place where numerous cultures have lived and sometimes clashed over millenniums — including Canaanite, Egyptian, Philistine, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Hellenic, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and British — claims to land and history are hotly disputed. Ruins and relics therefore can be seized upon as proof of who truly belongs on the land.
Some questioned the emphasis on Christian relics. The warehouse, holding finds from three decades of excavations at major archaeological sites, represents only a part of Gaza’s cultural heritage over more than 5,000 years. Much of that heritage has already been damaged since the start of the war in Gaza nearly two years ago.
Archaeologists say that is a loss for everyone. “There is no winner when heritage is destroyed,” Olivier Poquillon, the archaeological school’s director, said in a phone interview. “Heritage is something we have in common, and when it is destroyed it is like cutting the roots of a tree. Whatever my cultural, religious or ethnic background, I am losing part of my own history.”
Mr. Poquillon, who is also a Dominican friar and a lawyer, has friends in high places. When he learned last Wednesday of the immediate evacuation warning, he reached out: to UNESCO, to French authorities, to the Latin Patriarchate in Jerusalem and even to the Vatican, he said.
His efforts initially bought an extension until evening, but the challenge remained of organizing trucks and knowledgeable people to quickly pack, load and transport the treasures to safety.
Once the international community got involved, the agency that coordinates civilian movement in Israeli-occupied territories gave the school until noon the following day, Mr. Poquillon said.
Israel ran into criticism about this same site once before. Israeli troops in Gaza City had invited an official from the Israeli Antiquities Authority to visit the warehouse, according to video posted on social media early in 2024 by the authority’s director, Eli Eskosido. Some of the objects found there were then displayed in the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, in violation of international treaties forbidding the transfer of cultural property. Mr. Eskosido’s posts celebrating the finds drew condemnation, and he later took them down.
Despite that episode, the agency, the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, was unaware of the archaeological storeroom, according to a spokesman. When it learned that a building slated for bombardment held cultural treasures, it recognized the value of the archaeological finds and worked to make the safe transfer possible, he said.
Emek Shaveh, an Israeli nonprofit that opposes the politicization of archaeology, was among those that had objected to Mr. Eskosido’s posts. On Monday, the group called Israeli authorities’ effort to portray themselves as protecting cultural heritage in Gaza “absurd.”
“International law prohibits harm to cultural property, including archaeological sites, historic buildings, collections, museums, universities, archives, libraries, and more,” the group said.
As of mid-August, UNESCO had verified damage to 110 sites of cultural, historical and religious value to humanity, including seven archaeological sites, since the start of the war in Gaza.
The Israeli authorities’ emphasis on the objects’ importance to the Christian community missed the point, Emek Shaveh added. “The heritage of Gaza represents thousands of years of human culture and creativity and belongs to Gazans and Palestinians, regardless of their religion,” the group wrote.
Fadel Al Otol, an archaeologist from Gaza working at the Museum of Art and History in Geneva since March, began his career in archaeology as a teenager assisting with digs run by the French school, and helped to coordinate the hasty transfer of artifacts. Over the phone from Switzerland, he directed workers in Arabic as they packed and transported the objects.
“Time was passing fast. We got out about 60 percent of the objects,” he estimated in a phone interview. “I feel as if I lost a child.”
Moain Sadeq, a Palestinian archaeologist who teaches at the University of Toronto, founded a Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities in Gaza in 1994, when the Palestinian Authority governed the enclave. He said knows the treasures in the Gaza City warehouse well. Some came from Anthedon, a port city home to various cultures from 800 BC to 1100 AD, including Neo-Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine and early Islamic rulers. Some come from ancient Roman cemeteries, others from a church discovered in Jabaliya and from one of the first monastic sites in the region, the Saint Hilarion monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
The saved artifacts were all stored in the Al Kauther tower space rented by the French Biblical and Archaeological School, Mr. Sadeq said, a building the Israeli military bombed last week.
In 2007, when Hamas rose to power in Gaza, the ministry’s budget for excavations dried up, according to Mr. Sadeq, and he left with his family soon after. He said he does not agree with Hamas but “sometimes I feel the war is not against Hamas. It’s against culture, global culture.”
Mr. Sadeq said that before leaving Gaza he had had frequent exchanges and cooperation with his colleagues in Israel. He lectured at Ben Gurion University, and Israeli professors visited excavations in the enclave. “We had excellent relations,” he said. “I personally believe in archaeology with no frontiers.”
Still, archaeological finds are used as a tool to establish borders and who belongs.
Monday evening, hours before the military launched expanded ground operations in Gaza City, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the American ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, attended a ceremony at a highly contentious archaeological site in Jerusalem that encroaches on a Palestinian neighborhood.
Archaeologists believe that Jewish pilgrims thousands of years ago passed through on their way to the Temple Mount, considered the most holy site in Judaism, and also sacred to Muslims, who call it the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Mr. Huckabee, who has expressed support for Israeli annexation of occupied territories, said in a speech at the ceremony, “The stones absolutely and 100 percent validate that the Jewish people not only belong here now but they have belonged here for 4,000 years since the time God said to Abraham this is yours.”
Mr. Rubio, who before his visit had emphasized the site’s historical importance to multiple faiths, was explicitly supportive of the Israeli claim to the land, saying, “God’s promise is eternal and perfect,” and that he was “honored to be a part of its fulfillment here.”
Lynn Swartz Dodd, who directs the Dornsife Archaeology Research Center at the University of Southern California, co-founded the Israeli-Palestinian Archaeology Work Group, which in 2009 in Jerusalem presented a proposal on how to protect cultural heritage.
Since then, Israeli-Palestinian relations have broken down severely, hopes for a solution to the longstanding conflict have all but disappeared, and the need for agreement on how to coexist has become only more urgent as the war grinds on, many experts agree.
“Efforts to save human heritage, life, and dignity in Gaza allow us to understand what being human meant thousands or hundreds of years ago,” she wrote in an email. “And what being human means today.”