More than a year ago, a donkey cart wound its way through heaps of rubble in Gaza. Three young men brushed ash from burned book covers and stacked salvaged volumes onto the cart, racing to save them from Israeli airstrikes and neighbors trying to burn them for fuel, unable to access cooking fuel due to the Israeli blockade.
Omar Hamad, 30, is a pharmacy graduate who never stopped being a reader. He has helped collect and preserve more than 5,500 books since 2025. Recently, his war-torn book drive has materialized into an unlikely new library in the Gaza Strip, where he and his friends have been organizing the books into a library management system, still being completed.
He gathered these volumes along with his friends, Hussam Hamad, 42 and Ibrahim al-Masri, 31, for what they’ve dubbed the Phoenix Library. The books were gathered by any means possible: pulled from rubble, purchased, or reprinted. The library opened on April 21st.
A donkey cart carrying Omar Hamad, children, and books. (Photo courtesy of Egab)
Ibrahim al-Masri and Omar Hamad. (Photo courtesy of Egab)
Israeli airstrikes have buried Gaza under 61.5 million tons of rubble, or the equivalent of roughly 170 Empire State Buildings. It amounts to more than 169 kilograms of debris per square meter of the Strip’s surface.
Libraries, personal collections, and vast institutional archives lie under that mass—including the books these three young men raced to rescue before they could be burned for cooking fuel, the tragic result of a blockade that has made traditional cooking gas canisters critically short and prohibitively expensive.
The name of the library speaks for itself, O. Hamad told Shareable: “The Phoenix, rising from the ash.” Their efforts are part of a larger, community-driven pattern spreading across the Strip to save books and public libraries from the destruction of the US/Israeli genocidal war on Gaza.
The genocide’s toll on books and other valuable written materials has been catastrophic.
Since October 2023, at least 87 libraries in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed.
“Their efforts are part of a larger, community-driven pattern spreading across the Strip to save books and public libraries from the destruction of the U.S./Israeli genocidal war on Gaza.”
Gaza’s Central Archives, containing 150 years of historical records, was completely decimated by Israeli airstrikes early in the genocide, in November 2023. Later, in May 2024, Israeli soldiers burned Al-Aqsa University’s library, a pillar of the Strip’s higher education that housed one of Gaza’s largest academic collections.
Ahlam al-Sha’er, Director of Libraries and Heritage at Gaza’s Ministry of Culture, told Shareable that Gaza had more than 200 million books