Gaza’s archaeological heritage was destroyed in Israel’s genocide. These volunteers are trying to salvage it from the rubble: Israeli forces systematically and deliberately targeted many of Gaza’s archaeological sites, including ancient churches. Before the war, Gaza was home to archaeological sites and artifacts from periods spanning more than 5,000 years of continuous human civilization. Some looted artifacts have quietly resurfaced in a Paris exhibition

contact@ifamericansknew.org  

August 31, 2026  

Archaeology destroyed,  

destruction in gaza,  

israeli apartheid,  

khan younis,  

violation of international law

Tareq S. Hajjaj, reposted from Mondoweiss, August 31, 2026

MEMBERS OF THE HERITAGE GUARDIANS VOLUNTEER TEAM, AFFILIATED WITH THE MAYASEM ASSOCIATION FOR CULTURE AND THE ARTS, EXAMINE AND DOCUMENT HISTORICAL ARTIFACTS RECOVERED FROM BENEATH THE RUBBLE IN GAZA, KHAN YOUNIS, JUNE, 2026.(PHOTO: YOUSEF ABADLA)

Salvaged artifacts by the Mayasem Association for Culture and the Arts, Khan Younis, Gaza, June, 2026.(Photo: Yousef Abadla) (Anadolu Ajansi)

In the rubble of a bombed site in Khan Younis, a group of volunteers in yellow high-visibility vests work in near silence.

They have no tools but their hands, relentless determination, and the knowledge that what lies beneath the debris is irreplaceable. Carefully, they lift carved stone fragments and pottery vessels by hand, wrap ceramic pieces in whatever protective material they can find, and admire ancient statues, shattered on the ground, dating back thousands of years.

The volunteers are part of the Heritage Guardians Team, an initiative affiliated with the Mayasem Association for Culture and Arts. Although Israeli shelling never stopped rocking Gaza, they’ve been trying — carefully, methodically, and with bare hands — to save what remains of the Strip’s archaeological heritage before it disappears entirely under the rubble. 

According to Hamouda al-Dahdar, director of the Department of Archaeological Sites and Excavations at Gaza’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, Israeli forces systematically and deliberately targeted many of Gaza’s archaeological sites, most of which had remained closed throughout the war. “They were attacked without any apparent military justification,” he told Mondoweiss.

Before the war, the Gaza Strip was home to archaeological sites and artifacts from periods spanning more than 5,000 years of continuous human civilization. Nearly every part of the territory contained an archaeological site or historical remains, while five major museums preserved the vast majority of artifacts unearthed across Gaza.

But the ongoing genocide has left virtually nothing untouched. Beyond the destruction of homes, civilian infrastructure, and the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, the war has also devastated archaeological sites and artifacts painstakingly excavated and preserved over decades. Many have also been taken out of Gaza, in what the Strip’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities regards as theft....READ MORE  https://israelpalestinenews.org/gazas-archaeological-heritage-was-destroyed-in-israels-genocide-these-volunteers-are-trying-to-salvage-it-from-the-rubble/

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New Maps Show How Israel Has Thwarted Hopes for a Palestinian State

Palestinians collect belongings from their evacuated homes after the Israeli Army issued a number of short-term access permits for residents of the occupied West Bank refugee camp of Tulkarm, on June 17th.Photograph by Majdi Mohammed / AP

The breakneck expansion of settlements in the West Bank has rendered American talk of a two-state solution increasingly irrelevant.

By David D. Kirkpatrick

 

August 29, 2026  The New Yorker

Ten years ago, Frank Lowenstein, then the United States special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, presented President Barack Obama with maps of settlements by Israeli Jews in the occupied West Bank. The maps revealed that a chronic problem had turned critical. The expansion of settlements crisscrossing the West Bank threatened the hope of establishing a contiguous Palestinian state there. As Jews and Palestinians lived in roughly equal numbers in Israel and the territories it had occupied since 1967, those settlements also imperilled Israel’s claim to be both Jewish and democratic. By gradually accomplishing a de-facto annexation of the West Bank, the settlements would require Israeli Jews either to rule over a resentful non-Jewish population of about equal size or to surrender the Jewish identity of their state. From the perspective of the United States, either scenario would undermine the stability of the region.

Obama was in the final weeks of hinterntional lawis Presidency, and Lowenstein’s maps helped persuade him to let the United Nations Security Council pass a resolution condemning the settlements, which most of the world had long considered violations of international law. (The U.S. declined to exercise its veto and abstained from the vote.) In a speech a few days later, on December 28, 2016, Secretary of State John Kerry defended that decision with a stark warning that settlement expansion was “increasingly cementing an irreversible one-state reality.” He continued, “Is ours the generation that gives up on the dream of a Jewish democratic state of Israel living in peace and security with its neighbors? Because that is really what is at stake.”

Ten years later... READ MORE  https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/new-maps-show-how-israel-has-thwarted-hopes-for-a-palestinian-state    

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Israeli forces repeatedly stop aid and goods truck drivers at military checkpoints and inside the Kerem Shalom crossing, forcing them to strip, beating them, and humiliating them, even after they have received prior security approval to work and access these areas.

 

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

is in Gaza Strip.  ·

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Israeli forces have destroyed trucks and warehouses, targeted and detained drivers, and blocked the entry of trucks, spare parts, and essential maintenance materials in #Gaza.

 

Even when trucks are allowed through the crossings, their cargo may never reach those in need. Gaza’s transportation, storage, and distribution infrastructure has been systematically damaged or destroyed.

The shortage of spare parts has become so severe that workers are dismantling broken-down trucks to salvage parts and keep others running.

 

The cost of changing a truck’s oil has soared from around 450 shekels ($150) before the genocide to nearly 100,000 shekels ($33,000) today. One kilogram of engine oil, when available, can cost nearly $1,100.

 

And the drivers keeping this lifeline moving are themselves subjected to abuse.

 

Israeli forces repeatedly stop aid and goods truck drivers at military checkpoints and inside the Kerem Shalom crossing, forcing them to strip, beating them, and humiliating them, even after they have received prior security approval to work and access these areas.

 

This is more than a blockade of goods. It is the disruption of an entire lifeline, from the crossing to the hands of Gaza’s population.

 

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1492388512914889&set=a.620359713451111 

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Palestinian woman and NBC News team attacked by masked Israeli settlers in West Bank. The woman and crew were treated for injuries..... Between Jan. 1 and July 24, Israeli forces [IDF] or settlers [Zionists] killed 76 Palestinians, according to the latest data available from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Three Israelis were killed over the same period, the data shows.

NBC News journalists were attacked by masked Israeli settlers in the West Bank on Saturday.NBC News

Aug. 29, 2026 

By F. Brinley Bruton 

Masked Israeli settlers attacked and injured a Palestinian woman and members of an NBC News team reporting in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Saturday.

Three members of an NBC team were interviewing Aida Ahmed Abdullah and her family in the Palestinian town of Jalud, near Nablus, when the attack occurred. Abdullah said they had been driven out of their home by Israeli settlers, and the team was walking down a hill toward the house.

A gray car with Israeli license plates then drove in reverse up the hill toward them, video of the incident shows.

A masked man in a blue tracksuit, holding a stick, was leaning out of the rear passenger window as the vehicle approached. When the car stopped, at least four men in dark clothes and with their faces covered leaped out, hitting Abdullah and the crew with sticks and throwing rocks at them.

“They jumped out, beat us, then jumped back in the car,” said NBC News international correspondent Matt Bradley, who was hit twice in the arm and later treated at a nearby clinic.... READ MORE https://www.nbcnews.com/world/middle-east/palestinian-nbc-news-team-attacked-masked-israeli-settlers-rcna595024

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Life in Gaza next to Israel's 'Yellow Line' : This is life in Gaza near Israel's advancing ‘Yellow Line’, where two million people are now crammed into just 36 per cent of the Strip marked out by the Israeli military amid continued airstrikes, despite the ceasefire with Hamas.

 

 Aug 26, 2026

This is life in Gaza near Israel's advancing ‘Yellow Line’, where two million people are now crammed into just 36 per cent of the Strip marked out by the Israeli military amid continued airstrikes, despite the ceasefire with Hamas. 

 

Those living near the line risk injury or death at the hands of Israeli forces. 

 

It comes as Donald Trump's top Gaza official has criticised Israel for its ongoing airstrikes, which he said jeopardise the ceasefire and the US-backed plan to disarm Hamas. 

 

Nickolay Mladenov, who's on the Board of Peace, also criticised Hamas for failing to stop its military activities. 

 

Israel won't allow us into Gaza, so this report is produced with Gazan colleagues. 

 

We asked the Israel Defence Forces for a response to this report but did not receive one by the deadline.

https://youtu.be/FO0vEHkOAJY?si=7IthFo8b8XbtbbLp 

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"In Gaza, Palestinian journalists filming on their phones have provided an indispensable record of a war foreign reporters have largely been prevented from entering. There, picking up a camera is an act of extraordinary courage." Phoebe Greenwood

A man takes pictures of demolished houses in Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in 2023. Photograph: Mussa Issa Qawasma/Reuters

Sunsets, disasters, dinners: we now record them all with our phones. But what is that doing to our souls? 

As a war correspondent, I worked with photographers who said the camera was a buffer between them and reality. It is much the same now as we snap and scroll 

 

Phoebe Greenwood 

Sat 29 Aug 2026

I was sitting on a rooftop in Athens at sunset looking up at Filopappou hill. Athens in August is burning hot. Not so much hotter than London or Paris any more, but the sort of hot that makes it foolish to step out into sunlight before 6pm. Emerging from the air conditioning at dusk, I saw a dense line of silhouettes on the ridge above me. Almost every one of these shadows had its arm raised, holding a cameraphone towards the sunset.

Of all the pretty hills in the Greek capital, Filopappou arguably has the best view. The Acropolis stands directly to its north. To its south, where I sat, the city sprawls out towards the sea and a dark horizon of islands – Aegina, Salamina, Agistri.

Looking up, the wall of tourist photographers reminded me of something: war zones.

I worked as a correspondent covering conflicts and disasters for the Guardian and other newspapers for more than a decade. Over time, every new disaster came to resemble the last: another catastrophic tableau of buildings and bodies with a dense ring of telephoto lenses pointed at it.

Print reporters like me could stay at a distance from the gore and the horror because we could describe it. The photographers had to get as close as possible because they needed a clean shot.

Later, when I asked them about their work over beers at the American Colony hotel bar or tea at Gaza’s now-destroyed Al Deira hotel – how could they do it? Spend their days gazing at suffering? – most said the same thing. The lens was a buffer, a sort of protective forcefield. They weren’t looking at the fatally injured child, they were looking at the image of one.

The illustrious war photographer Don McCullin was wise to the danger in this distance. “I operate not as a photographer but as a human being,” he said in 1983, 16 years before the first cameraphone. “I try to balance what I photograph not as a photographer but as a person, a man, and photography has got nothing to do with it. It is just something I have learned, it is just a way of communicating.”... READ MORE   https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/29/sunsets-disasters-dinners-record-phones-camera-reality 

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