Israel’s relentless military campaign in Gaza City is destroying far more than homes and civilian infrastructure. It is systematically erasing the cultural, historical, and spiritual fabric of Palestinian life. Centuries-old mosques, churches, markets, archives, museums, cemeteries, and archaeological landmarks are all being reduced to rubble, in what amounts to an intentional war against memory, heritage, and identity. This is not collateral damage, but a cultural genocide by Israel; a deliberate assault designed to cut Palestinians off from their own history while the world’s most powerful governments look away, or worse, actively enable it.
Erasure of Gaza’s historic and cultural history via Israel’s genocide
The human cost of the Israeli occupation’s holocaust in Gaza is huge. As of 14 September, nearly 64,870 people, including more than 19,400 children, are confirmed to have been killed, and more than 164,600 injured. Almost the entire population has been displaced. But alongside this horror lies an irreversible, quieter catastrophe: the destruction of Gaza’s historical and cultural legacy. Gaza City, with its layered history stretching back thousands of years, is being reduced to ruins.
UNESCO has warned that the losses are staggering and may be permanent and, without urgent action, Gaza’s cultural landscape will entirely disappear. By mid-August 2025, the UN agency had verified destruction or severe damage to at least 110 cultural sites since Israel’s assault began in October 2023.
These included 13 religious landmarks, 77 structures of historical or artistic importance, nine monuments, one museum, seven other archaeological sites, and three facilities safeguarding artefacts and archival materials -including the Central Archives building and the main public library in Gaza, which contained thousands of historical documents dating more than 150 years.
At the time of targeting in 2023, the head of Gaza municipality, Yahya Al-Sarraj, said:
Targeting the Central Archives poses a great danger to the city, as it contains thousands of historically valuable documents for the community.
Al-Sarraj pointed out that:
these documents … represent an integral part of our history and culture.
Gaza: a historical trade and cultural centre destroyed
Historically, Gaza was an important trade and cultural centre in the region.
Inhabited since at least the 15th century BC, Gaza is located on the shores of the Mediterranean. Being at the junction of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the Strip formed an important link between East and West, with its Anthedon Port a regional hub for commerce and culture.
The Old City of Gaza once formed a vibrant maze of narrow streets, markets, centuries-old stone homes, and landmarks rooted in Islamic, Christian, Ottoman, and Mamluk history. Today, it faces imminent devastation. Israel’s bombardment and ground operations have already largely destroyed the Great Omari Mosque, Gaza’s most revered religious site, which for centuries stood as a centre of worship and scholarship.
The medieval Church of Saint Porphyrius, believed to be the third-oldest church in the world, has sustained heavy structural damage. Both hold immense cultural and spiritual significance for Palestinians and are part of humanity’s shared heritage.
Entire marketplaces, defined by their Ottoman and Mamluk-era architecture, have been flattened. UNESCO reports at least 146 historic homes across Gaza’s Old City, many over four centuries old, have been reduced to rubble. The ancient port of Anthedon Harbour, dating back to 800 BC was targeted by 2000lb bombs, and obliterated. Other treasures have been devastated as well. The Monastery of Saint Hilarion, known as Tell Umm Amer is one of the oldest and largest monastic complexes in the Middle East dating to the 4th century and granted enhanced protection under the Hague Convention, has been wrecked by bombardment and bulldozing operations.
Cemeteries and burial sites have also suffered intentional large-scale destruction, cutting off Palestinians from long-rooted cultural and spiritual traditions. Gaza’s museums and archival repositories, where irreplaceable documents and collections were stored, have also been targeted, further erasing shared memory and identity.
A pattern amounting to war crimes
This widespread razing of heritage is not random, nor is it an accident. Israel’s campaign relies on a methodical combination of aerial and artillery strikes, bulldozers, and booby-trapped vehicles to flatten entire districts, ensuring that sites are not just damaged but obliterated. This approach makes restoration impossible. Even cultural landmarks that have not yet been touched face annihilation as swathes of Gaza are bulldozed into dust.
Legal experts argue that such deliberate targeting of cultural and religious heritage – sites that are not legitimate military objectives – constitutes war crimes under international law.
International humanitarian law states that cultural property enjoys special protection in war. The 1954 Hague Convention and its 1999 Protocols, along with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, make cultural destruction a crime. Campaigners warn that this strategy is part of a broader settler-colonial project: to erase the physical and symbolic markers of Palestinian identity, weakening their claim to the land and even to existence itself.
Israel’s cultural genocide: erasing identity and memory
Palestinians and international cultural experts emphasise that what is being destroyed is more than ancient stones or historic markets. It is collective memory. Gaza’s religious and cultural landmarks embody centuries of continuity, resilience, and identity. They connect communities across generations. To destroy them is to sever Palestinians from their history and, by extension, their future.
According to Professor Salah Hussein Al-Houdalieh, general secretary of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) in Palestine, destruction of built cultural heritage:
systematically erase the identity of targeted communities and undermine their historical continuity, in order to facilitate their subjugation within a colonial framework dominated by the occupying power. The destruction of cultural heritage severs the deep-rooted connections between a people and their past, akin to cutting the primary roots of a centuries-old tree – leaving it vulnerable, incapable of resilience, and unable to bear fruit for future generations.
This is why cultural and legal scholars describe Israel’s campaign as a ‘cultural genocide’. It sits alongside mass killing, forced displacement, and the razing of civilian homes as part of a systematic effort to uproot Palestinians from their land and destroy the physical anchors of their civilisation. To bulldoze Omari Mosque or flatten Hilarion Monastery is not simply to erase monuments – it is to try to erase a people’s identity itself.
The West’s complicity – including the UK
Yet, Israel’s impunity persists, and it is no accident. This destruction is actively sustained by Western complicity. Israel does not act alone. The United States, UK, Germany, France, and other European powers are partners in this erasure.
They arm Israel with fighter jets, bombs, and bulldozers. They provide billions of dollars in aid that fund the war machine. They shield Israel diplomatically, repeatedly vetoing UN Security Council measures that could intervene, and blocking UNESCO-led initiatives to protect Gaza’s threatened heritage. They continue to sign lucrative trade, technology, and military cooperation deals with Israel even as its forces raze ancient landmarks to dust. These governments are not neutral actors, but collaborators. Their weapons reduce sacred mosques and markets to rubble. Their political cover allows Israel to carry out war crimes in broad daylight. Each historic quarter destroyed, each archive lost to fire, carries not just Israeli responsibility but Western fingerprints as well.
The time for statements of ‘concern’ has long passed. International bodies and cultural rights groups are now demanding action. UNESCO has repeatedly urged emergency measures to safeguard threatened cultural heritage in Gaza. Legal experts are insisting that the International Criminal Court include the destruction of cultural and religious heritage in its investigations into alleged war crimes and genocide.
The ICC has already issued arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, including the prime minister and former defence minister. These warrants must be executed. And further indictments are needed, specifically tied to the destruction of cultural memory and identity. International law obliges states to enforce these rulings. To delay this will mean a further eroding of trust in international justice.
Time for the Israeli regime to face accountability for its 77 years of crimes
In addition, an immediate arms embargo, bans on dual-use military goods, freezing of Israeli officials’ assets, implementation of travel bans, and suspension of military, economic, and political cooperation agreements are necessary. Trade deals and collaborative initiatives that enable Israel’s crimes must be ended. Anything less makes international law a hollow promise. But accountability cannot be limited to Israel alone. Western governments that arm and shield Israel must also face consequences.
This is not only a war fought with bombs and tanks. It is a war against continuity, against collective history, against memory. Every destroyed mosque, monastery, ancient home, marketplace, and cemetery silences centuries of Palestinian presence. The goal is clear – to ensure that Palestinians inherit only absence, that their history is torn away along with their homes and lives.
The destruction of Omari Mosque, the scarring of Saint Porphyrius, the obliteration of Anthedon Harbour, the bulldozing of Saint Hilarion, the flattening of 146 historic homes, old markets, and entire neighbourhoods – these are not isolated acts. They form a pattern: the wholesale destruction of Palestinian identity, of world heritage, of humanity’s shared civilisation.
Palestinians refuse to be erased by Israel’s cultural, and physical, genocide
Palestinians refuse to be erased. Even as monuments are reduced to rubble, memory survives in resilience, in storytelling, in oral history, in survivors determined to preserve what has been taken. Gaza’s people continue to resist the erasure of their culture in every way they can.
The question is whether the world will act. Our governments have a choice: to enforce international law, halt arms sales, sanction Israel and its leaders, and protect Gaza’s surviving cultural heritage, or to remain complicit in genocide. Silence is collusion. Empty statements while supplying bombs is complicity.
The ruins of Gaza bear witness not only to Israel’s crimes but to the collapse of an international system that pretends to uphold justice, and for the international community to stand by silently, as these treasures vanish into smoke and rubble, is to allow the Israeli occupation’s intentionally manufactured genocide to continue unchallenged.
Featured image via the Canary
By Charlie Jaay
This post was originally published on Canary.