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A statue of a priest holding an incense burner, a fragment of a helmet, and a camel-shaped drinking vessel, all from the Greek or Roman period, during the installation of “Trésors sauvés de Gaza: 5000 ans d’histoire” at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France, March 31, 2025
Until 2024, the objects on display in “Trésors sauvés de Gaza” (“Treasures Saved from Gaza”), an exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris that closed last December, had been sitting in crates in Geneva for seventeen years awaiting their return to the Gaza Strip, where they were destined for a museum not yet built. More than five hundred items were “ready for departure,” as the show’s curators put it in an introductory text: a Roman jar with a human face, pieces of Byzantine columns, a lintel with sumptuous leaves.
Many of them—some 260—came from the collection of a businessman named Jawdat Khoudary, a construction company owner in Gaza City who would set aside artifacts his team found as they built. (Later he expanded his holdings with purchases.) In the fall of 2006 he shipped hundreds of items to the Geneva Museum of Art for an exhibition, hoping for their prompt return. But the following year, after its victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections, Hamas took over the Strip and Israel imposed a blockade. Caught in a diplomatic tangle between Switzerland, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel, the art remained in a freeport in Geneva. Khoudary tried repeatedly to get his collection back, as he told the Swiss paper Le Temps in 2019. But the pieces stayed in exile.
In 2008 Khoudary opened a museum of his own in the north of Gaza City. “The idea is to show our deep roots from many cultures in Gaza,” he told The New York Times at the opening. “It’s important that people realize we had a good civilization in the past.” Only six months later, an exchange of air strikes between Israel and Hamas broke ceramics and amphorae in the collection. “Maybe I made a mistake when I established this museum,” he told Archaeology Magazine. At the beginning of Israel’s bombing campaign in 2023 the museum sustained heavy damage. Videos circulating in early 2024 show burnt stone and lonely columns; the show’s curators relate that four thousand pieces are missing or destroyed.
The fate of Khoudary’s collection was all too common. Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed over 70,000 people and destroyed most of the Strip’s buildings, farmland, and health infrastructure, has not spared Palestinian cultural patrimony. As of January 20, 2026, according to UNESCO, 150 world heritage sites in Gaza had sustained damage since the start of the war, including mosques, churches, monuments, and repositories of archaeological remains. “Trésors sauvés de Gaza,” which presented 123 works from those crates in Geneva, was both a preview of what a future museum of Gazan history might look like and a reminder of everything it will not contain. As world powers debate Gaza’s future, the show asks, what will remain of its past?
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