Books shouldn't have survival stories. But in Gaza, pulling a single volume from pulverized concrete is an act of defiance.
When ten-year-old Aya al-Shawa clutched Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Empty House in her northern Gaza schoolroom, she wasn't just holding a story. She was holding a survivor. That book spent months buried beneath the shattered masonry of a flattened building before bibliophiles dug it out, cleaned away the soot, and mended its torn binding.
Right now, roughly 98 percent of school buildings across the Gaza Strip are destroyed or heavily damaged, according to UNICEF data. More than 700,000 children have faced profound disruptions to their formal education since October 2023. When schools are reduced to tents and classrooms exist only in memory, physical books transform from ordinary possessions into fragile lifelines for learning and sanity.
The Rubble Libraries of Beit Lahiya and Deir al-Balah
Take Mohammed Saad. Before the war, this Beit Lahiya resident spent over 35 years building a monumental personal collection housing between 50,000 and 100,000 titles. On December 7, 2023, that life's work was obliterated.
Displaced 16 times, Saad refused to leave his history behind. He dug through his ruined home, risking his life among unstable debris, and managed to salvage roughly 12,000 books. He carted them to Deir al-Balah, where he set up a tent library named Athar—meaning impact or historical relic.
Every day, local children visit Saad's tent. They hunt for stories that offer a brief escape from relentless hardship. To keep volumes accessible when families face crushing poverty, Saad prices them at symbolic rates between 5 and 15 shekels ($1.63 to $4.89).
Yet, saving books from bombs is only half the battle. Saad faces an unyielding new enemy inside his tent: the weather.
"I saved them from beneath the rubble and from the fire. Today, I cannot save them from the rain," Saad noted.
The Logistics of Restoring Printed History Under Siege
Other volunteers are doing identical, grueling work. Omar Hamad, a 30-year-old displaced from Beit Hanoon, tracks down destroyed libraries across northern Gaza and Gaza City. Alongside his team, Hamad has extracted around 3,000 books. Some emerge from university ruins like the Islamic University of Gaza, where rare volumes—including historical texts like The Catastrophe of Palestine, printed in 1956—lay scattered among masonry.
Once recovered, the labor shifts to intensive triage. Hamad and his collaborators clean off dust, scrape away debris, and glue detached pages. For complex binding disasters, they rely on veterans like 71-year-old Jameel Mikdad in the Shati refugee camp.
Mikdad has spent over 45 years as a bookbinder. Though his own printing shop was destroyed, he keeps working with bare-bones tools. He sews spines, glues torn sections, and rebuilds covers by hand.
The economic blockade makes this restoration work brutally expensive. Before the war, a 3-kilogram container of white glue cost roughly 30 to 50 shekels. Today, under the suffocating siege, that same glue costs between 450 and 500 shekels ($146 to $163). A single book can take up to a week to repair, often costing more in materials than its original cover price.
Some books are simply too far gone. Volumes suffering 80 to 90 percent damage are left behind. Other severely charred or bullet-riddled books are collected anyway—not to be read, but to stand as permanent physical witnesses to the destruction.
Putting Literature Back Into the Hands of Students
Hamad's Phoenix Library operates on a lending model rather than direct sales. Readers can check out books after leaving a refundable 50-shekel deposit ($16.30). The shelves feature everything from medicine and law to science, history, and children's literature.
Children like Aya grab these rescued titles because standard educational frameworks are fractured. When your classroom is a cramped tent exposed to the elements, a borrowed novel acts as both an educational anchor and a window to the outside world.
Every saved volume completes a long, improbable journey. It starts on a quiet shelf, survives a catastrophic airstrike, spends months under rubble, undergoes meticulous hand-repair, and finally lands in the hands of a young student determined to keep learning against all odds.
The books are open again. The stories refuse to stay buried.
