Researchers rescuing war-damaged manuscripts in Gaza receive Unesco prize

Unesco has awarded the 2026 Unesco/Jikji Memory of the World Prize to two Gazan heritage professionals—historian Abdul Latif Hashim and researcher-engineer Haneen Al-Amassi—for rescuing and digitising war-damaged manuscripts in Gaza. Unesco Director-General Khaled El-Enany named them laureates following an international jury’s recommendation, and they received the $40,000 prize at a ceremony in Cheongju, Korea, on 4 September. Selected from 58 nominations (the award’s highest number), they were recognized for creating an emergency response team that recovered rare documents from rubble, including materials from the Medieval Great Omari Mosque Library in Gaza’s old city, which was mostly destroyed in December 2023 by Israeli shelling. Their work preserved and digitised more than 25,000 pages from the Mamluk and Ottoman periods, supported by the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme and carried out under the local NGO Eyes on Heritage with support from the International Council on Archives, including establishing Gaza’s first specialized manuscript restoration laboratory. Jehad AbuHassan of Première Urgence Internationale said manuscripts remain at risk and that PUI’s INTIQAL programme plans further cooperation to stabilize the Omari Mosque library building.

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