Gaza cultural sites destroyed, Palestinian Museum digitizes heritage for preservation

Amidst the widespread destruction of cultural sites in Gaza, Palestinian institutions are racing to preserve their heritage through a monumental digitization effort. The Palestinian Museum, located in Birzeit, is spearheading the creation of an extensive digital repository, safeguarding social and cultural history by storing copies across multiple countries.

This ambitious project is designed to create a resilient archive, ensuring that if one server is attacked or a physical collection is destroyed, the records will persist elsewhere. The urgency of this task has intensified following the significant damage to cultural sites in Gaza. UNESCO has verified damage to 164 cultural sites since October 7, 2023, including museums, historic buildings, and repositories of movable cultural property.

Amer Shomali, director general of the Palestinian Museum, highlighted that the loss extends beyond physical objects. He stated that when archives disappear, communities lose vital evidence of their way of life, their traditions, and their self-understanding. The museum began its digitization initiative in 2018, collecting scanned private collections from Palestinian families, including photographs, documents, diaries, and films.

To date, the museum's website lists 343,485 digitized items and 142,227 archival resources across 416 collections, documenting over two centuries of Palestinian life. However, digitization alone does not guarantee invulnerability. The museum's website has faced regular cyber-attacks, necessitating the use of geographically distributed backups to maintain access. This distributed system ensures there is no single point of failure, making the collection robust against localized destruction or server outages.

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When archives disappear, he said, communities also lose evidence of how people lived, worked, celebrated and understood themselves.