“This is the museum. Destroyed. The next picture is the museum before the war. Here is the garden, destroyed… The garden before the war… There, my house…” Breathless and with a tight throat, Jawdat Khoudari shows off part of his life. “Thirty years is all that remains.” Or a pile of rubble. In images sent to him by a relative in February, a hurricane of fire appears to have razed the hall of Al-Mathaf – “the museum” – his work. For seven months, the fate of his ancient statues, coins and vases, witnesses to the rich history of the Gaza Strip, has been unknown.
Near the Al-Chati refugee camp, facing the sea in the north of the Palestinian territory, the septuagenarian had built an oasis of tens of thousands of square meters housing a hotel and, above all, a collection of objects attesting to the millenary heritage of the Gaza Strip: Byzantine columns, amphorae, sarcophagi, Bronze Age tableware and Hellenistic statuettes were displayed in wooden display cases or in the garden of his house. However, it is precisely from the north of the Gaza Strip that the Israeli offensive began following the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. The troops of the Jewish State occupied Al-Mathaf for two months, between December and February, as shown by a video released by the soldiers before their withdrawal. The premises have since been destroyed.
“I don’t know if my collection was looted. But the truth is that most of the exhibits have disappeared. Were they destroyed, buried, stolen? I don’t know. In December, I had to leave the North and head south, towards Rafah, like all the inhabitants. When I left, the army was already occupying the museum and my house.”He said that he managed to reach Egypt from Rafah at the beginning of the year.
Discoveries at construction sites
“What happened to my museum and my garden is a reflection of what happened to the entire territory. These destructions are not the result of a war, but of a desire to destroy everything.”, He accuses himself of passing through Paris in mid-September, invited by the Arab Centre for Research and Political Studies in Paris for a conference on Gaza’s heritage. A businessman and heir to an old family of landowners, Jawdat Khoudari became a collector, an amateur archaeologist and director of his own museum. The project to build an official archaeological museum, built with international funds, has remained in limbo since Hamas took power in the Gaza Strip.
You have 64.8% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
