By Haya Hijazi
In Gaza, destruction is not limited to homes, hospitals, and markets. Less visible, yet equally tragic, is the erasure of memory, knowledge, and culture: the obliteration of libraries.
For decades, libraries—university archives, public collections, school libraries, and even personal shelves in family homes—were fragile lifelines to the outside world. In a besieged enclave where travel and access to education are restricted, books were more than paper; they were passports, companions, and windows to a world most Gazans could never touch.
Today, many of these collections lie in ruins. Bombed universities have lost research and historical archives. Schools where children once held storybooks now stand silent, with torn pages fluttering in the rubble. Private libraries, painstakingly built over decades, have turned to ashes. Every lost book is not just paper destroyed—it is a dream, a voice, a life’s work silenced.
I spoke with students who described their despair. Nadia, a medical student, told me:
“I was working on my thesis about women’s health, relying on rare journals that no longer exist after the library was destroyed. It feels as if my future was buried with those books.”
At a local school, a 10-year-old boy held a torn page from his favorite book and said:
“I tried to save it, but it’s not the same. It feels like a piece of my childhood is gone.”
Even home libraries have not been spared. Take my own father, a pediatrician and passionate reader. He had collected over two thousand books over forty years in our home in northern Gaza. He never sold a single book—they were a part of him, of his life and knowledge. When our home was bombed, the library burned completely, taking decades of passion, research, and memories with the flames.
Similarly, the Abu Ali family, who gathered their books over three decades, found most of their library reduced to ash after their neighborhood was hit. The father said:
“These books are not just books. They are our memories, our children’s dreams. Now everything is gone.”
The destruction of libraries is not collateral damage—it is an assault on memory and identity. To erase books is to erase the ability to remember, to learn, and to pass on culture. In Gaza, where generations already struggle under siege, the loss of libraries is a wound that will outlast the war.
Global conversations about Gaza often highlight destroyed hospitals, lives lost, and displaced families. These are urgent tragedies, but they do not tell the full story. There is a slower, quieter death: the death of memory. A society without its libraries is robbed not only of its present but of its past and future.
Libraries are not just buildings; they are guardians of language, history, imagination, and dreams. When Gaza’s libraries burn, it is not only Gazans who lose. The world loses stories, research, voices, and perspectives that might change how we understand resilience, struggle, and humanity.
Rebuilding Gaza will not only be about reconstructing homes and hospitals. It must include rebuilding memory—schools, archives, and libraries. Without that, the people of Gaza will remain displaced even in their own land, unable to reclaim the written traces of their identity.
Having grown up surrounded by these books, I mourn not only the buildings destroyed but also the dreams they held. When books turn to dust, memory itself is endangered. And when memory burns, so does the hope of a future built on knowledge.
Haya Hijazi is a 29-year-old obstetrician and gynecologist from Gaza, a humanitarian activist, and a freelance writer.
26 September 2025
Source: countercurrents.org