There was not a second to spare. On September 10, around 9 am, when the Israeli army called a security officer from the NGO Première Urgence Internationale, all seemed lost. The army ordered the evacuation, within 30 minutes, of a building in downtown Gaza City, in what was once the upscale Rimal neighborhood. After that deadline, the structure could be bombed and destroyed at any moment.
The threat was real. The Israeli army resumed its offensive on Gaza City at the beginning of September. The entire city was under a blanket evacuation order. In this new phase, the army targeted high-rise buildings, leveling them with airstrikes. After two years of conflict, little of the enclave’s infrastructure remains. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), as of early September, 78% of structures had been destroyed, either entirely or partially.
But on the ground floor of the building the army had warned about, behind an unremarkable iron door, lay the most remarkable archaeological repository in a territory inhabited for more than 3,500 years. It was a storage facility rented by the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem (EBAF), one of the Holy City’s most important archaeological research centers.
Inside were amphorae from across the Mediterranean, plasterwork from a Hellenistic house, skeletons recovered from a Roman necropolis and glass and stone objects – all evidence of a period stretching from the Iron Age to the dawn of Islam. In total, about 180 cubic meters of archaeological items tell the story of an entire chapter of Gaza’s history. This storage facility is the enclave’s last intact storage facility, aside from the archaeological sites themselves. Every other museum, whether public or private, has been destroyed by the Israeli army. To the untrained eye, much of it looks like broken pottery, but scientifically, the collection is of great value.
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