Gaza Residents Dig Books From Library Rubble After Israeli Strikes Destroyed Dozens of Collections

The library in Beit Lahia was gone. Mohammed Saad went back anyway, with a small hammer and no heavy machinery, and spent hours opening a passage into the collapsed building.

"I began pulling the books out one by one," he said.

Saad had spent 35 years assembling al-Athar Library, buying entire collections from people in Gaza and Egypt who were forced to sell their books, sometimes by the box. He estimates the library held roughly 100,000 volumes before it was destroyed. He recovered part of that collection. The rest remains under the rubble.

What survived is now stacked on the floor of a tent in Deir al-Balah, in southern Gaza, with no shelves, cabinets, or tables. Some books spill onto the pavement outside. Saad sells a portion at what he calls symbolic prices and lets others read for free. "Children and young people come looking for novels, stories and other books," he said.

A March 2026 report by the Cultural Cooperation Programme, cited by The New Arab, found that 87 public libraries and archives in Gaza had been partially or completely destroyed in the course of Israel's military campaign. Occupation Watch has not independently verified that figure or the methodology behind it, and the report has not been corroborated by other sources reviewed for this article.

The individual rescue efforts described by residents are easier to pin down: named people, specific places, specific numbers.

Niveen al-Gharabli, 41, collected books from the ruins of universities and public and private libraries and opened a stall inside a tent, offering free copies to students who cannot pay. "My goal is to save a generation they wanted to destroy," she said. "The Palestinian's weapon is knowledge."

Omar Hamad, a 30-year-old pharmacist from Beit Hanoun, started by salvaging roughly 120 books from his own home library before expanding into a project he named Phoenix Library, after the bird that rises from ash. He has described retrieving around 400 books from the ruins of the Islamic University library in a single day, and roughly 300 more the following day, including volumes he says were printed in Gaza before 1948.

These are first-person accounts, not an audited inventory. The scale of what each person has recovered has not been independently confirmed. What is documented is the pattern: libraries reduced to rubble, and residents without equipment or institutional support trying to pull what remains back into circulation, one hammer strike and one cardboard box at a time.