When the painter Mohammed Al-Hawajri was a young boy, he used to visit the Old City of Gaza, a bustling and ancient section of covered market in Gaza’s capital. At the centre stood the al-Omari Mosque, built in 1149 and flanked by a dense labyrinthine gold market, or souk. The souk, its windows brimming with yellow brilliance, had endured centuries of upheaval. Raised during the Mamluk Sultanate, scarred by British troops in World War I, then partially restored, it told the story of a bygone Gaza and the empires that shaped it.

Al-Hawajri fondly remembers walking through the Old City with his family, admiring the domes and arches of the ancient mosque and the worn gravestones in the neighbourhood’s cemetery. “The market was full of life and movement, and the voices of the gold vendors singing beautiful songs,” he recalls. For more than three decades, he and his wife, Dina Mattar, had poured the memory and vitality of Gaza’s streets into their art, featured in exhibitions from Vogue Arabia to the Sharjah Biennial.

When war broke out in October 2023, Mattar and Al-Hawajri remained in Gaza for four months before fleeing. That spring, the only remaining crossing for human exit was bombed by Israeli forces, sealing off the territory entirely. They both took their paintings with them—an especially poignant act as they had also both stopped creating when the war started. Their home in the al-Bureij refugee camp was destroyed in an air strike, followed soon after by the partial bombing of Eltiqa Gallery, the art space and collective they had helped to found to support Gazan artists.

“There was no space to create art,” said Al-Hawajri. “All I could think about was our children, our family and finding a safe place in Gaza—but there are no safe places in Gaza.” Now in Sharjah, their family is safe, and Al-Hawajri and Mattar are painting again. His canvases are vivid yet mournful—fusing religious motifs with scenes of devastation; the Gaza of memory layered with the Gaza of grief. Mattar’s works feature women rendered in bold, arresting colour, clutching symbols of Gaza’s resilience: fish, oranges, cacti.

Al-Hawajri believes the destruction of cultural and heritage spaces, such as the gold souk, the al-Omari Mosque and Eltiqa Gallery, is a means of fracturing the richness and resourcefulness of Gazan culture. “Before the war, we had the siege,” he explains, which led to artists like themselves seeking greater community.

“We couldn’t travel for training or exhibitions, so we had no choice but to extract inspiration from the community around us.” Gaza’s art, cultural spaces and heritage sites were glimmers of light in the hardship of a blockaded, war-torn region, sustained with intention and pride.

Some are able to find these cultural touchstones—even when they have been forced to leave home. In Berlin, the Multaka project facilitates intercultural exchange and allows refugees from various countries to share their cultural pride. The project, which is a co-operation between Berlin’s Museum of Islamic Art, the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, the Bode-Museum and the German Historical Museum, allows people from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran to become paid guides in sections of the museum that are meaningful to them.

Sandy Albahri, a Multaka guide originally from Syria, has been leading tours at the German Historical Museum and the Museum of Islamic Art for 10 years. She sees the program as “a space to promote dialogue, cultural participation and inclusion for our communities.” Some of the most meaningful moments, she says, are when she connects with visitors over their own histories of displacement. “In those conversations,” she notes, “I often find myself saying, ‘This feels like home.’ There are many objects in the Museum of Islamic Art that stir a deep nostalgia for home.”

Using AI to Restore History

For centuries, artists like Al-Hawajri have derived inspiration from the remnants of civilizations past. But in times of war and disaster, the destruction of these cultural touchstones carries not just the risk of damage, but also of more broadly documenting the essence of a people’s history and culture. When our sites of shared culture and heritage are destroyed, the loss is existential.

In the past, ruined cultural sites became something you could only view in textbooks, with grainy archival photographs or renderings from archaeological digs. Now, with the help of artificial intelligence, and online collectives that connect restoration experts with local communities and funding from some of the wealthiest countries and organizations in the world, some of the destruction of cultural sites can be delayed and even restored. In the Middle East, a region where so much of humanity’s history began, researchers, activists and artists are working together to develop new techniques to preserve these sites.

Some of those projects are happening in real time—Al-Hawajri’s beloved al-Omari Mosque in Gaza’s centre is one such example. The Geneva-based ALIPH Foundation, the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage and the world’s largest fund for cultural restoration, has been working with smaller NGOs across the world to record, preserve or restore sites during conflict. Among others, they provided funds to Palestinian NGO RIWAQ to perform emergency stabilization measures to al-Omari after it was first struck in December 2023 and to preserve its minaret, the only intact piece of the mosque. In addition, ALIPH has funded training for 20 restoration professionals who are ready to deploy to Gaza as soon as the situation allows.

Sandra Bialystok, director of communications and partnerships at ALIPH, lauds the organization’s capacity to provide rapid-response grants to local partners during moments of crisis, but says some of the most cutting-edge work they and their partners, including Microsoft and French tech company Iconem, are able to do is through their project HeritageWatch.AI. Launched in February 2025, it uses satellite imagery and photogrammetry (the science of using thousands of photographs to measure and produce 3-D modelling of a site) to detect critical shifts in sites, like in cases where they are vulnerable to climate change or near conflict, or for monitoring and assessment after a site has been destroyed. Bialystok notes that particularly in Africa, where many heritage sites are exposed to flooding, landslide and other natural disaster risks, ALIPH has been using photogrammetry to prepare records of a site and track changes to it. Though the process often relies on artificial intelligence, it is also something of an art that involves guesswork where imagery is not obtainable. In the case of ALIPH’s climate change work, they hope that pre-emptive satellite imaging can create identical replicas and predictive risk modelling before damage occurs. Satellite imaging of such sites can also help to prevent or track looting of cultural goods.

Reviving Syria’s Cultural Legacy

ALIPH was in part inspired by the massive destruction suffered by Syrian and Iraqi heritage sites during Daesh’s (ISIS) reign of terror in the territories. The loss of major world heritage sites, such as Palmyra in Syria and the destruction of artifacts spanning from prehistory to the Islamic period in the Mosul Museum in Iraq, remain some of the highest profile incidents in the collective imagination of cultural loss.

Since 2018, the Mosul Cultural Museum has been one of ALIPH’s premier projects. Though many of the museum’s key artifacts were evacuated to Baghdad in 2003 before the onset of war, many monumental artifacts, such as sculptures from the Assyrian palace and 28,000 rare books and manuscripts, remained in Mosul, where Daesh vandalized, burned and set off explosives, destroying or damaging them in highly publicized, filmed stunts. They also sold pieces from the museum on the black market, including a carved ivory plaque from Nimrud that was dated as far back as the seventh century.

Now, roughly seven years later, some of the world’s premier restoration professionals are painstakingly piecing together the artifacts that remain and rehabilitating the museum structure, an outstanding example of Iraqi modernist architecture in itself. During assessments, investigators found the roof mined with explosive devices, which were carefully stabilized and secured. The project, which is planned to finish in 2026, is supported through ALIPH and partners including the World Monuments Fund, the Smithsonian Institution and the Musée du Louvre, signalling its importance as a cultural institution on a global level.

Reviving the museum is not just about preserving priceless artifacts, however. For many of the Iraqi staff, it’s a way to push past traumatic events and reclaim their pride and connection to their culture—and to show that off to the world. Reflecting on the participation of international organizations, Zaid Ghazi Saadallah, Mosul Cultural Museum director, noted in a video released by ALIPH: “We have a sense of pride in this land, which is important not just for the Iraqi people…but also for the international community. It’s everyone’s responsibility to save this heritage and cultural identity.”

Likewise, the reconstruction of Palmyra in Syria epitomizes the global community that can emerge out of collective trauma. Few conflicts in recent memory have produced more wrenching examples of heritage destruction than the Syrian civil war and the period of Islamic State control.

Rebuilding a Virtual Palmyra

In 2015, the world watched as Daesh captured Palmyra, an ancient city in the heart of Syria dating back to the Neolithic period. Fighters detonated explosives, demolished monuments and looted artifacts, but the grief over Palmyra’s destruction was pre-empted by a small community of activists and tech professionals who had been monitoring the site well before the civil war began. They recognized that documenting and sharing the uniqueness of the ancient city was as much about cultural preservation as it was human rights.

At the heart of this effort was Bassel Khartabil, a Syrian open-source software entrepreneur who had been captivated by Palmyra since childhood. In the early 2000s, he connected with other global technologists and history enthusiasts through Creative Commons, a non-profit dedicated to expanding creative sharing. Among those he collaborated with were Jon Phillips, an American creative technologist who eventually flew to Syria in 2010 to assist with a project Khartabil was spearheading: reproducing Palmyra as an immersive virtual environment. Their goal was to photograph and apply emerging photogrammetry technologies to create 3-D models of the entire city, so that anyone in the world could explore its history.

“It was very important for Bassel because at the time so many people saw the Arab world as very dark, but Palmyra was a chance to show people the diversity of Syrian history and culture,” Phillips says.

Along with volunteers from Creative Commons and technologists from other online communities, they began building models and looking for archival footage of Palmyra to contribute to their efforts. But in 2012, after speaking up against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and involving himself in the non-violent protest movement, Khartabil was detained without charges. He became one of thousands of Syrian men and women who had disappeared during the Assad regime.

Rather than give up on the project, Khartabil’s friends felt their preservation efforts had even more importance and potential. Rebranding the initiative #NEWPALMYRA and recognizing the interest and connection people around the world had in the city, they launched a social media campaign soliciting images of the region for their modelling. Their messaging centred around freedom of cultural expression and ultimately amassed thousands of user-submitted images of the ancient city. With those inputs, the #NEWPALMYRA team documented the area almost entirely, creating 3-D imagery of important features such as the Arch of Triumph, the Temple of Bel and the Roman theatre.

By the time Daesh seized Palmyra in 2015, the #NEWPALMYRA team had succeeded in documenting and digitally replicating it. The team rendered 3-D-printed replicas for display in cities such as London and Venice—both to raise awareness about Khartabil’s detention and to highlight the destruction of important archaeological sites by Daesh and the Syrian civil war. While their work succeeded in many ways, including inspiring global letter-writing campaigns and advocacy from Human Rights Watch and other high-profile NGOs, Khartabil remained in Assad’s brutal prison system and was eventually executed.

Palmyra itself suffered greatly: Daesh destroyed many of its iconic monuments and looted previous documents and artifacts. Later, once the Assad regime regained control of the city, it was further damaged due to fighting between Assad’s troops, their Russian backers and rebel forces.

For Khartabil’s friends, working on the project provided as much a legacy to honour him as it contributed to modelling a version of Syria they all hoped to see again. The project became both a memorial and a vision for a future Syria—a reminder that cultural memory could outlive the horrors of the present moment.

As the Syrian conflict entered a new phase, with the Assad family fleeing Damascus in December 2024, #NEWPALMYRA’s digital archive became more than symbolic. Its painstaking documentation could serve as a foundation for the eventual restoration of Palmyra, whenever the new Syrian government and its international partners begin the work of rebuilding—a date that remains to be set.

For now, Palmyra remains relatively untouched since the destruction of the last decades—a traumatic reminder of the horrors Syrians were subjected to over the past decade and a half. Yet, like the salvaged minaret of Gaza’s al-Omari Mosque, it holds a fragile promise. These ancient sites tell a story of duality: humanity’s capacity to destroy and, just as powerfully, to preserve and painstakingly piece together the fragments. Any reconstructed mosque or temple will always bear some scars and the traces of human repair, no matter how advanced the technology. Ultimately, it is the human stories—Mohammed Al-Hawajri painting the Gaza of his childhood as a refugee, Bassel Khartabil’s global network of friends using digital memory to defend both heritage and human rights—that reveal why these battered stones matter. They are less about monuments than about us, and the fragile threads that connect culture, memory and survival.