How Palestinians Are Building a Digital Archive That Can’t Be Erased

Published 6 July 2026 · tech

Palestinian culture has been looted, destroyed, and displaced for decades. Since October 2023, however, the destruction of Gaza’s cultural institutions has accelerated, prompting a team

Palestinian culture has been looted, destroyed, and displaced for decades. Since October 2023, however, the destruction of Gaza’s cultural institutions has accelerated, prompting a team in the occupied West Bank to build something they hope cannot be seized or erased: a digital archive of Palestinian memory. “Within a week, Israel bombed two art galleries, seven museums, two main archives in Gaza, and hundreds of archaeological sites,” says Amer Shomali, a prominent visual artist and general director of the Palestinian Museum. “This battle of trying to erase the Palestinian culture and Palestinian memory—it’s not something theoretical.” Shomali says that roughly 80 percent of the country’s national collections have been looted, destroyed, or remain under Israeli control.

Against that backdrop, the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit has become both a physical repository of Palestinian heritage and the center of an increasingly ambitious digital preservation effort. Designed by New York–based Heneghan Peng architects, the same firm behind Egypt’s Grand Egyptian Museum, the building is home to numerous Palestinian collections, including photographs by Khalil Raad and murals by Vera Tamari. The magnificent museum stands in defiance here, among gardens of native flowers and cascading terraces. Yet, Shomali says, the site sits between various checkpoints, making it hard for some Palestinians to access. A 2025 report by the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem says at least 2,400 archeological sites in the West Bank have been taken over by Israel.

Israeli settlers, under the protection of the Israeli army, carry out a raid in the ancient city and the surrounding archaeological site in the town of Sebastiya, Nablus, West Bank, Palestine, on June 29, 2026. Photograph: Nedal Eshtayah/Getty Images. Meanwhile, Reuters reported in June that Israeli lawmakers are advancing legislation that would place ancient sites in the occupied territory under the Israeli Ministry of Heritage, a move that Palestinians and Israeli rights groups say amounts to de facto annexation and could further expand Israeli control over Palestinian heritage sites. As of March 24, 2026, Unesco had verified damage to 164 cultural sites in Gaza since October 7, 2023, including historical buildings, religious sites, museums, and archaeological sites.

Many more cultural artifacts and personal histories have likely been lost amid the war, mass displacement, and the destruction of entire communities. “It was a continuous battle all the time between us and them,” says Shomali about historical efforts to archive Palestinian artifacts amid Israeli aggression since 1948. “We document, they loot; but every time we document, we document with less vivid memory.” It is one of the reasons the museum turned to technology. In 2018, the team began building what Shomali describes as an “unlootable archive”—a digital repository designed to preserve Palestinian history beyond the walls of any single institution.