29th of December 2023

ICOMOS Palestine’s statement regarding the continuation of genocidal war on
Gaza Strip in Palestine

On the eighty-third day of the aggression against the Gaza Strip, more scourges of war are
being waged by the Israeli occupation army, along with the American and Western allies against
the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. The West Bank and Jerusalem are exposed, which has
so far claimed about eighty thousand lives killed, injured, and missing under the rubble,
displacing more than 1.9 million Palestinians from their homes and destroying about 70% of
residential buildings in the Gaza Strip, destroying the vast majority of schools, universities,
kindergartens, shelter homes, and hospitals. In addition to a high percentage of homes and
residential buildings, Infrastructure in cities, villages, and camps in the West Bank.

Several sources of human heritage in Palestine with architectural, historical, aesthetic, religious,
and cultural values were exposed, during the aggression on the Gaza Strip – and are still being
subjected to intentional and systematic destruction and obliteration, which has caused all of
humanity to lose a heritage that it can be proud of and cherish.

We received information about massive destruction in the Pasha Palace Museum; the official
museum in Gaza City. It consists of two historical buildings that are testimony to the region’s
rich cultural heritage and the history of diverse civilizations. This palace is one of the few
remaining examples of Islamic architecture in Gaza. The Pasha Palace was built in the period
between 1260 and 1277 during the Mamluk era. Moreover, it is located in the area of Al- the
Daraj quarter, which is full of ancient buildings close to the Great Al-Omari Mosque also
destroyed at the beginning of December as reported in Report#2.

Gaza’s Hamam al-Samra, a later on, Hamam Al-Samra, or the Samra Bath is one of the main
and few remaining Ottoman architectural sites in Gaza. Though it existed for hunderds of years
till the beginning of the war, it was operational. Al-Qaysariyya Market was built in the
fourteenth century AD as an integral part of the southern entrance of the Great Al-Omari
Mosque. The market has been significantly destroyed; the Israeli army’s destruction of heritage
resources in the Gaza Strip extended to the West Bank, where on 12/24/2023, Israeli settlers,
with the protection of the Israeli occupation army, seized a large geographical area in the
village of Battir and placed mobile homes in it, and bulldozed the site, taking into consideration
that Battir has been registered by the Palestinian government since 2014 on the List of World
Heritage in Danger.

The actions carried out by the Israeli occupation army in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank
supported by the Israeli settlers, and the destruction they are inflicting on human heritage are
considered a full-fledged war crime and a clear violation of charters, agreements, and
international law, especially those devoted to the situation of armed conflict, such as the
Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, the 1954 Hague Convention and its Second Protocol of
1999, the World Cultural, and Natural Heritage Convention of UNESCO on 16 November
.1972

ICOMOS Palestine is no longer convinced and will not agree with the timid statements issued by
institutions related to cultural heritage and human rights. Rather, it clearly demands to stop the
war immediately, that the perpetrators of this destruction be criminalized and brought to the
International Criminal Court, and that they be held responsible for their actions that led to a
change in the cultural landscape that we have inherited over thousands of years.