After international experts pressed Israel to give an extra day for the evacuation, Fadel and others remotely guided Palestinian volunteers and aid workers through an incredible feat. Racing against the clock, they moved away six lorryloads of artefacts – including fragile ceramics, mosaics and centuries-old skeletons – to a safer place across the bombed-out city.Thousands of archaeological relics rescued in Gaza ahead of IDF strike. Army says Hamas was using warehouse that contained artifacts from over 25 years of excavations, including some of the oldest known evidence of Christianity in Gaza (Melanie Lidman, Times of Israel).Some items had previously been damaged by nearby Israeli shelling and break-ins at the site, but Fadel had left boxes of artefacts carefully packed and inventoried on the shelves.
He estimates that 70% of the contents of the ground-floor storeroom were successfully removed. They included many rare finds.
But all items left behind were crushed when rockets destroyed the 13-storey al-Kawthar building on Sunday. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it was targeting “Hamas terrorist infrastructure.”
The warehouse contained artifacts from over 25 years of excavations, including items from a 4th-century Byzantine monastery designated as a World Heritage Site by the UN cultural organization UNESCO, and some of the oldest known evidence of Christianity in Gaza. The Israeli military said the building housed Hamas intelligence installations and planned to demolish it as part of their expanded military operation in Gaza City.I have posted on this story already here, but these articles give additional details and the BBC article includes some background.
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