You can help build the first public library in Gaza since the genocide began.
Two Palestinians are gathering donations to create a public library in Gaza, after Israel’s war and genocide destroyed nearly all existing libraries, schools, and universities. The two men, Omar Hamad and Ibrahim, are avid readers who have spent years trying to save books as they struggled to survive in Gaza.
On their donation page, Omar wrote about his early love of books, and how as a child he saved, “coin by coin, until at the end of each month I could buy two or three books.”
When he received an evacuation order on October 8th, 2023, Omar packed up what books he could and fled. But each time he was forced to evacuate, his collection dwindled. He nearly lost his entire salvaged library when the hospital he was sheltering in was attacked:
When the soldiers stormed the building, they dragged us out with insults, blows, and humiliation. I said goodbye to my books and left a note among them:
“Whoever finds these books, please take care of them.”
I deliberately left it unsigned — I wanted the books to remain free, without an owner.
Miraculously, the books survived.
Omar kept trying to rescue books as he was repeatedly displaced. Books felt essential to him, and as he wrote in Lit Hub back in June, “My library was like paradise—I would travel and sail through its books to seize wisdom and the self I had forgotten since the first day I was forced to abandon reading.”
Salvaging books from wrecked libraries and schools has led to some agonizing choices, Omar told The Jordan Times, and he’s found it “very difficult to preserve the cultural spirit amidst this destruction.” Omar has been documenting his library on Instagram, in particular his favorite Russian writers like Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Svetlana Alexievich, and Mikhail Bulgakov.
The other librarian behind this effort is Ibrahim, who fell in love with books in university, particularly Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and Tamim Al-Barghouti, and Gabriel García Márquez.
Ibrahim’s house was completely destroyed by Israeli forces, but miraculously, his bookshelf survived: “And then I saw it — my small book cabinet, perched at the top of the rubble, its pages breathing through the stones as if refusing to die. In that moment, something inside me returned to life.”
With their new library in Gaza, the two are hoping to preserve as many books as they can, but also build a space for rebuilding collective memory and fostering expression, creativity, and play. Their tenacious defense of books amidst brutality and genocide is not only an attempt to preserve objects, or institutions, or even a culture under assault:
“With your support, you are not rebuilding a place —
you are rebuilding a life that can continue.”
James Folta
James Folta is a writer and the managing editor of Points in Case. He co-writes the weekly Newsletter of Humorous Writing. More at www.jamesfolta.com or at jfolta[at]lithub[dot]com.
