It was a graceful white stone structure, with repeating vistas of pointed arches and a tall octagonal minaret encircled by a carved wooden balcony and crowned with a crescent.The lower half of the minaret and a few exterior walls are reported to be the only parts of the mosque still standing.

Gaza is rich in cultural treasures, with some 325 formally registered heritage sites within just 141 square miles, including three designated for UNESCO’s World Heritage tentative list. The Omari Mosque is one of over 200 ancient sites damaged or destroyed in Israeli raids since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.

As a scholar of Islamic architecture and archaeology, I know the Omari Mosque as a building that embodies the history of Gaza itself – as a site of frequent destruction, but also of resilience and renewal. While narratives about Gaza often center on war and conflict, Gaza’s rich history and pluralistic identity as expressed through its cultural heritage equally deserve to be known.

Layered histories

The sun-soaked coastal enclave of Gaza, with the tidy stone buildings of its old city and its verdant olive and orange groves, has been a trade hub that connected the Mediterranean with Africa, Asia and Europe for millennia. It was famed in particular as a transit point for incense, one of the ancient world’s most precious commodities. Given its abundant agricultural and maritime riches, Gaza has known conquest by nearly every powerful empire, including the ancient Egyptians, the Romans, the early Islamic caliphs, the Crusaders and the Mongols.

Gaza’s history of repeated conquest meant that buildings were often destroyed, reimagined and rededicated to accommodate changing political and religious practices. New sacred structures were continually built over old ones, and they frequently incorporated “spolia,” or stones reused from prior buildings. The Omari Mosque, too, was such an architectural palimpsest: a building embodying the layered, living material history of the city.  

In the second millennium B.C., the site of the mosque is believed to have been a temple for Dagon, the Philistine god of the land and good fortune. The temple is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as the one whose walls were felled by the warrior Samson, who is locally believed to be buried in its foundations.

In 323 B.C., Gaza fiercely resisted the conquest of Alexander the Great, and the city endured devastating destruction when it was finally subdued. Yet after Gaza was conquered by the Romans in 50 B.C. it entered a period of renewed wealth and prosperity. A concentric domed temple was built for Marnas, a god of storms and the protector of the city, on the site of the future mosque. He was venerated there until just before 400 A.D., when the Byzantine Empress Eudoxia imposed the new faith of Christianity and ordered the destruction of the temple.