Gaza City

• 1. Introduction

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  Gaza City sits on the Mediterranean coast, 76.6 kilometers southwest of Jerusalem, and it has been fought over, rebuilt, and fought over again for at least five thousand years. Few places on earth carry that much accumulated weight. The name itself first appears in the military records of the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III in the 15th century BC, which means the city was already old enough to be worth documenting by one of antiquity's great conquerors. Since then, Gaza has passed through the hands of ancient Egypt, the Philistines, Alexander the Great, Rome, the Arab Caliphate, the Crusaders, the Mongols, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, the British, and more. Each era left something behind and destroyed something else. What made Gaza worth seizing, again and again, was geography. It sat at the crossroads of the coastal route connecting North Africa to the Levant and served as a key stop on the spice trade flowing up from the Red Sea. Control Gaza, and you controlled one of the ancient world's most valuable commercial arteries. The questions this documentary will trace are not simply who held Gaza when, but what life actually looked like inside those walls during the city's long stretches of prosperity, and how catastrophe followed prosperity with such grim regularity.

• 2. Before the Conquerors

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  Settlement in the region of Gaza reaches back to an ancient Egyptian fortress built in Canaanite territory at Tell es-Sakan, a site south of the present city. That settlement was abandoned around 3000 BC, then refounded by the Canaanites around 2600 BC, then abandoned again around 2300 BC. The restlessness of those early centuries set a pattern that would never really end. A second urban center, Tell el-Ajjul, grew along the bed of Wadi Ghazza while Tell es-Sakan lay empty. Under the pharaoh Thutmose III, who reigned from 1479 to 1425 BC, Gaza became a stop on the King's Highway, the great commercial road of the Levant. Egypt's grip on the city lasted roughly 350 years, making it one of the longer periods of stable control Gaza would ever know. When the Philistines arrived in the 12th century BC, they folded Gaza into their pentapolis, a league of their five principal cities. The city changed hands relatively peacefully after that, gaining relative independence under the Persian Empire. That autonomy ended abruptly in 332 BC, when Alexander the Great besieged Gaza for five months. It was the last city to resist him on his march toward Egypt. After he captured it, Alexander either killed or enslaved the inhabitants and repopulated it with people from neighboring areas, reshaping it as a Greek polis. Under the Seleucid Empire that followed, the city was briefly renamed Seleucia, and Greek culture took root deeply enough that Gaza earned a reputation as a flourishing center of Hellenistic learning and philosophy. In 312 BC, during the Third War of the Diadochi, Ptolemy I Soter defeated Demetrius I Poliorcetes at the Battle of Gaza. By 277 BC, a Ptolemaic fortress controlled the spice trade with Gerrha and South Arabia. Then came the Hasmonean siege of 96 BC, when King Alexander Jannaeus reportedly killed 500 senators who had fled into the temple of Apollo. The city was rebuilt again, and the cycle continued.

• 3. Rome and the Cross

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  Pompey Magnus incorporated Gaza into the Roman Empire in 63 BC, and for several centuries that Roman umbrella brought a degree of prosperity the city had rarely sustained. A 500-member senate governed Gaza, and its streets held a mix of Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, Jews, Egyptians, Persians, and Bedouin. The city's mint struck coins bearing the faces of gods and emperors. Emperor Hadrian visited in 130 AD and personally inaugurated wrestling, boxing, and oratorical competitions in a new stadium, a gesture that speaks to how much Rome valued the city's status. The main cult was that of Marnas, but temples also stood for Zeus, Helios, Aphrodite, Apollo, Athena, and the local Tyche. This religious plurality was interrupted when Christianity spread through Gaza starting around 250 AD. The conversion process accelerated sharply under Porphyry of Gaza between 396 and 420. In 402, the Emperor Theodosius II ordered all eight of Gaza's pagan temples destroyed. Four years later, Empress Aelia Eudocia commissioned a church to be built directly on the ruins of the Temple of Marnas. The Christian philosopher Aeneas of Gaza, a native son, called his hometown "the Athens of Asia" during this period. A Jewish synagogue of notable size was still functioning in Gaza in the 6th century, confirmed by later excavations. The Christian bishop of Gaza was already a formal office by the early 4th century, when Saint Sylvan held the post. Gaza's port at Maiuma had its own early Christian community as well. When Roman rule finally fractured, Gaza remained under the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire, and kept its role as an important center for southern Palestine.

• 4. A City of Islamic Law

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  Around 638 AD, Arab Muslim forces under Amr ibn al-As captured Gaza, several years after the Battle of Ajnadayn between the Byzantine Empire and the Rashidun Caliphate in central Palestine. The city resisted stiffly and at length, yet Amr's army did not destroy it or harm its civilian inhabitants. The reason cited in the historical sources was the city's connection to Hashim ibn Abd Manaf, the great-grandfather of Muhammad, believed by Islamic tradition to be buried there. That burial site gave Gaza a sacred significance that protected it at a critical moment. Some of the city's churches were converted into mosques, including what became the Great Mosque of Gaza, the oldest in the city. A large segment of the population adopted Islam and Arabic became the official language. In 767, the scholar Muhammad ibn Idris ash-Shafi'i was born in Gaza and spent his early childhood there; he later founded the Shafi'i school of jurisprudence, one of the four principal legal schools of Sunni Islam. Jewish and Christian communities were permitted to maintain vineyards, and grapes, a major cash crop, were exported primarily to Egypt. The Abbasid geographer al-Maqdisi described Gaza by the 10th century as "a large town lying on the highroad to Egypt on the border of the desert." That prosperity was punctuated by violence: Gaza was destroyed at the end of the Qays-Yaman war of 793 to 796, then rebuilt, then partially destabilized again when the Fatimid Caliphate negotiated a territorial boundary in 978 that placed Gaza on their side of a line dividing Palestinian lands with the Turkic ruler of Damascus.

• 5. Mongols, Mamluks, and a Golden Disrupted

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  The Crusaders took Gaza in 1100, and in 1149 King Baldwin III built a castle there for the Knights Templar. He also converted the Great Mosque back into a church, the Cathedral of Saint John. The Arab traveller al-Idrisi wrote in 1154 that Gaza was "today very populous and in the hands of the Crusaders." That occupation ended when Sultan Saladin's Ayyubid forces captured the city in 1187. Richard the Lionheart refortified it in 1192, but the walls came down again under the Treaty of Ramla in 1193. The decisive blow came in 1260, when Hulagu Khan's Mongols completely destroyed Gaza, which became the southernmost point of his conquest. The Mamluks, Muslim slave-soldiers based in Egypt, then took control and in 1277 made Gaza the capital of a province stretching along the coastal plain from Rafah in the south to just north of Caesarea, and eastward to the Samarian highlands and the Hebron Hills. The Syrian geographer al-Dimashqi described Gaza in 1300 as "a city so rich in trees it looks like a cloth of brocade spread out upon the land." Under Emir Sanjar al-Jawli, who governed Gaza from 1311 to 1320 and again in 1342, a period of architectural flourishing took hold, and most surviving Mamluk-era buildings date to his tenure. Then came 1348 and the bubonic plague, which killed the majority of the city's inhabitants. Four years later, a destructive flood struck. Yet when the traveller Ibn Battuta visited in 1355, he noted Gaza was "large and populous, and has many mosques." The Mamluks permitted Jewish residents to return after the Crusaders had expelled them, and by the end of the Mamluk period the Jewish community in Gaza was the third largest in Palestine, after Safad and Jerusalem. An Italian Jewish traveller, Meshulam of Volterra, described it in 1481 as "a fine and renowned place" with roughly fifty to sixty Jewish households engaged in artisan trades and winemaking.

• 6. Ottoman Rule and Its Golden Age

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  In 1516, Gaza entered the Ottoman Empire as a small town with an inactive port and ruined buildings, but it did not stay that way for long. The city became the capital of the Gaza Sanjak, part of the larger Province of Damascus. The Ridwan family, named after governor Ridwan Pasha, ruled Gaza for over a century. Under Ahmad ibn Ridwan, a partnership with the prominent Islamic jurist Khayr al-Din al-Ramli transformed the city into a cultural and religious center. The Great Mosque was restored, six other mosques were built, and Turkish baths and market stalls spread through the city. The Ridwan period is described as Gaza's last golden age, a time when it functioned as the virtual capital of Palestine. Governor Husayn Pasha dramatically reduced tensions between the settled population and neighboring Bedouin tribes, allowing a long stretch of peaceful commerce. After the Ridwan family was removed from office and Ottoman officials took direct control, the city began a gradual decline. Muhammad Ali of Egypt conquered Gaza in 1832, and the American scholar Edward Robinson visited in 1838 and described it as a "thickly populated" town larger than Jerusalem, with a hilltop Old City and suburbs extending across the plain below. Robinson observed that Gaza's bazaars were "far better" than those of Jerusalem, supplied by caravan trade between Egypt and northern Syria. He also noted that virtually all ancient traces had vanished due to centuries of conflict and occupation. The municipality of Gaza City was formally established in 1893, under the chairmanship of Ali Khalil Shawa.

• 7. The 20th Century and Its Displacements

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  British forces captured Gaza during the Third Battle of Gaza in 1917, folding the city into Mandatory Palestine. The population before World War I had reached 42,000, but the 1922 British census recorded only 17,480 residents, a sharp fall traced to the wartime battles. In the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan, Gaza was assigned to an Arab state, but Egypt administered it after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. A massive influx of Palestinian refugees displaced by that war and the Nakba swelled the city's population dramatically; by 1967, the population had grown to roughly six times its 1948 size. Gaza was occupied by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967. The First Intifada began in 1987, with Gaza at its center. In September 1993, the Oslo Accords transferred administration to the new Palestinian National Authority, and the newly established Palestinian National Council held its inaugural session in Gaza in March 1996. In January 2006, Hamas won a surprise victory in elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council. In 2007, violent clashes between Hamas and Fatah left more than 100 people dead, with Hamas ultimately taking control. An Israeli-led and Egyptian-supported blockade followed. By 2008, a report documented that 95% of Gaza's industrial operations had been suspended, unemployment approached 40%, and households spent an average of 62% of their income on food, compared to 37% in 2004. The number of families depending on UNRWA food aid increased tenfold in less than a decade. In 2010 the economy grew by 8% in the first eleven months as closure policies eased, a fragile recovery in a city whose population had reached 590,481 by 2017.

• 8. What Endures

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  Gaza's cultural and architectural inheritance accumulated over millennia only to face concentrated destruction beginning in October 2023, when Israeli airstrikes began targeting the city as part of the Gaza war. The siege of Gaza City started on the 2nd of November 2023. By January 2024, between 70 and 80% of all buildings in northern Gaza had been damaged or destroyed. The Great Mosque, which had stood as a pagan temple, then a Byzantine church, then an Arab mosque, then a Crusader church, then a mosque again, collapsed in 2023. The Sayed al-Hashim Mosque, believed to house the tomb of Hashim ibn Abd Manaf, was damaged by an airstrike in October 2023. The Church of Saint Porphyrius, the third oldest church in the world and the oldest active church in Gaza, was partially destroyed in an airstrike on the 19th of October 2023 that killed at least 18 civilians sheltering inside. The Public Library of Gaza, which had held nearly 10,000 books in Arabic, English, and French and opened in 1999 through cooperation between the city, the French municipality of Dunkirk, and the World Bank, was destroyed by airstrike on the 27th of November 2023. Qasr al-Basha, the Mamluk-era villa where Napoleon once stayed and which had become a girls' school, was destroyed in the Israeli invasion of 2024. The Commonwealth Gaza War Cemetery, which held the graves of Allied soldiers from World War I and sat 1.5 kilometers northeast of the city center, was damaged in the early stages of the 2023 war. Gaza's cuisine, embroidery traditions, university life, and street markets had all defined an urban culture that emerged from the layering of every empire and community that had ever called the place home. The city that bore witness to Muhammad ibn Idris ash-Shafi'i's childhood and to Alexander the Great's most stubborn siege now carries the weight of yet another rupture in its five-thousand-year story.