Palestinians look to salvage Gaza's history from the ruins of Israel's military offensive

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Muneer Elbaz remembers the joy of visiting the Great Omari Mosque in Gaza with his family, praying at a site where people have worshipped over centuries as empires came and went.

“These were the best days,” Elbaz said, as he recalled promenading through the lively markets around the mosque before the Israel-Hamas war. “This place transports us from one era to another.”

Today, much of the mosque stands in ruins — like most of Gaza — after being hit by Israeli strikes in the two-year war muffled by an uncertain ceasefire. The sight of the rubble brings to mind “a tree that had been uprooted from the land,” said Elbaz, a Palestinian heritage consultant involved with recovery work at the site.

Israel’s military offensive killed over 72,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's Health Ministry, and erased entire extended families.

Gone too is some of the heritage of a land with a rich history going back to ancient times. The mosque was built on a site where a Byzantine church had stood, and changed hands and even religions as one invader followed another.

With major military operations halted, Palestinians are gaining a clearer picture of the destruction. Some organizations are trying to save what they can at historical sites, even as full-scale restoration — and the broader reconstruction of the territory — face major obstacles.

Israel launched its offensive after Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took another 251 hostage in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack. The military accuses Hamas of concealing military assets beneath or near heritage sites, as well as other civilian structures.

The U.N. cultural agency, in an ongoing assessment based on satellite images, says it has verified damage to at least 150 sites since the start of the war. They include 14 religious sites, 115 buildings of historical or artistic interest, nine monuments and eight archaeological sites.

They are fragments of Gaza’s soul, connecting Palestinians to a place and a history that many fear is at risk of being erased.

“These sites were an important element that solidifies the presence of the Palestinian people on this land and that represents the continuity of their cultural identity,” said Issam Juha, co-director of the Centre for Cultural Heritage Preservation, based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

“They want to erase the Palestinian identity and Palestinian heritage and ... to remove any connection that keeps the Palestinian society clinging to this land,” he said.

The center is doing urgent rescue work at the badly damaged Pasha Palace, which housed centuries-old artifacts, many of which appear to have been looted, Juha said. Among the missing items are an Ottoman-era Quranic manuscript, jewelry from the medieval Mamluk era and a Roman-era sarcophagus from which only some fragments have been recovered, according to Hamouda al-Dohdar, an expert working at the site.

The Israeli military said it struck “a Hamas military compound and an anti-tank missile array” at the site. It said its forces struck a “terror tunnel” at the Omari mosque. It did not provide evidence in either case.

Amir Abu al-Omrain, an official with Gaza's endowments ministry, part of the Hamas-run government, denied the allegation about the mosque.

UNESCO does not have a mandate to assign responsibility for the damage it assesses.

An independent commission established by the U.N.’s Human Rights Council said it was not aware of any evidence of a tunnel shaft in the mosque. Noting the Israeli allegations about the mosque, it said that even the presence of a "legitimate military objective … would not have justified the resulting damage.” Israel has previously accused the commission of bias.

The centuries-old Saint Porphyrius Orthodox church complex, which had been sheltering displaced Palestinians, was also hit in an Israeli attack early in the war, causing deaths and injuries. The military said it had targeted a nearby Hamas command center. UNESCO said the church complex was moderately damaged.

Some of Gaza's heritage sites appear to have been spared. UNESCO said it has found no evidence of damage at the Saint Hilarion Monastery, dating to the 4th century.

Under international law, cultural property should not be targeted or used for military purposes.

The Israeli military says it takes the sensitivity of cultural and religious sites into account, aims to minimize damage to civilian infrastructure and adheres to international law.

Artifacts and accounts stretching back thousands of years testify to Gaza’s long history of commerce and conflict. Egypt’s pharaohs sent chariots through the low-lying coastal strip in their wars with the Hittites in modern-day Turkey. Traders in Gaza did brisk business with the ancient Greeks.

The Omari mosque, named for Islam’s second caliph, was initially built in the seventh century. Centuries later, the Crusaders converted it into a cathedral, and it went back to being a mosque after they were expelled, said Stephennie Mulder, associate professor of Islamic art at the University of Texas at Austin.

The mosque was damaged during World War I, when the British shelled Gaza in their campaign against the Ottoman Turks, and was later rebuilt.

“The building itself told the story of Gaza’s past as a crossroads of trade, armies, empires, and religious traditions,” said Mulder. “For many Gazans, the Omari mosque stood as a beloved symbol of multiplicity, resilience and persistence.”

Mohammad Shareef, 62, remembers attending prayers at the mosque with his father when he was a child, and studying for exams in its quiet confines. Years later, he would bring his own children there. He wept when it was hit.

“We were raised in it and around it, and there’s no stone here that we haven’t stepped on,” he said. “For the people of Gaza, this is their history.”

The loss will feel particularly acute during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which begins later this month. Before the war, thousands converged on the mosque for Ramadan prayers amid a festive atmosphere. This year, a large tented structure has been erected.

In recent days, workers have been filling wheelbarrows in the shadow of a damaged minaret.

Hosni Almazloum, an engineer working at the site, said the mosque’s prayer hall ceiling had collapsed and columns had crumbled. He said it could be rebuilt, if construction supplies are allowed in. For now, teams have been focused on recovery and preventing further damage, sifting through and storing stones.

The U.S.-brokered ceasefire agreement, which halted most of the fighting in October, gives no timeline for Gaza’s reconstruction, which may prove impossible if Israel maintains the blockade it imposed on the territory when Hamas seized power in 2007, after the militant group won Palestinian elections in 2006.

Many historic sites suffered from neglect before the war. The blockade and previous Israel-Hamas wars, along with a lack of resources and urban sprawl, posed challenges. Hamas-run authorities have leveled parts of what archaeologists believe was a Bronze Age settlement to make way for construction projects.

Elbaz says that before the ceasefire, grief was a luxury he couldn’t afford — his family was just trying to survive.

“What would you begin to cry over?” he asked. “The historic mosques or your home or your history or your children’s schools or the streets?”

Now, as he processes the war’s toll, he sometimes weeps, away from the eyes of his children.

“Gaza is our mother,” he said. “We have memories everywhere — in this tree, this flower, this garden and this mosque. Yes, we cry over every part of Gaza.”

Fam reported from Cairo.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Workers inspect Hamam al-Sumara, a historic bathhouse in Gaza City, after it was heavily damaged during the Israel-Hamas war, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)

FILE – Archaeological columns are displayed outside the Pasha Palace, a museum housing artifacts that was later damaged in the Israel-Hamas war, in Gaza City, Tuesday, July 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra, File)

A view of the historic Pasha Palace in Gaza City after an Israeli airstrike badly damaged the building during the war in the Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)

FILE - A Palestinian woman walks past the historic Pasha Palace in Gaza City after an Israeli airstrike badly damaged the building during the war in the Gaza Strip, Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi, File)

FILE - Workers carry out recovery projects and search for missing artifacts at the Pasha Palace in Gaza City after an Israeli strike damaged it during the war with Hamas, Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi, File)

FILE - Palestinians gather outside the Great Omari Mosque after the afternoon prayer in Gaza City. Friday, Sept. 14, 2018. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana, File)

FILE - Palestinian vendors set up outside the Barqouq Castle, which was later damaged during the Israel-Hamas war, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Wednesday, July 17, 2019. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra, File)

Palestinians walk in front of the Barqouq Castle in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip after it was damaged during the Israel-Hamas war Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem)

FILE - Palestinians rest outside the steam room at Hamam al-Sumara, a historic bathhouse in Gaza City, Saturday, May 2, 2015. Hamam al-Sumara means "Samaritans' Bath" in Arabic. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra, File)

A visitor looks at antiquities displayed at the Pasha Palace, a museum in Gaza City that was later damaged in the Israel-Hamas war, in Gaza City, July 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra, File)

FILE - Palestinians rest at the reception of Hamam al-Sumara a historic bathhouse in Gaza City, Saturday, May 2, 2015. Hamam al-Sumara means "Samaritans' Bath" in Arabic. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra, File)

FILE - Palestinians gather to attend Friday prayers at the Great Omari Mosque, which was damaged during the Israeli military's air and ground operation in Gaza City, Friday, Feb. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi, File)

Palestinian children walk through rubble at the Great Omari Mosque in Gaza City after it was damaged by an Israeli strike during the war with Hamas, Wednesday. Feb. 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)

FILE - Palestinians attend Friday prayers at the Great Omari Mosque in Gaza City after it was damaged by Israeli bombardment during the Israel–Hamas war, Friday, Nov. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi, File)

FILE - Palestinian men rest or pray in the Great Omari Mosque in Gaza City during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan before it was damaged by an Israeli strike during the war with Hamas, Tuesday, Aug. 17, 2010. (AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra, File)

FILE - Palestinians attend Friday prayers at the Great Omari Mosque in Gaza City after it was damaged by an Israeli strike during the war with Hamas, Friday, Nov. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi, File)

A view of the Great Omari Mosque in Gaza City after it was damaged by an Israeli strike during the war with Hamas, Wednesday. Feb. 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)

NEW YORK (AP) — Ted Turner, a brash and outspoken television pioneer who raced yachts, owned huge chunks of the American West and transformed the news business by launching CNN in 1980, has died at age 87.

The network reported Turner died Wednesday, citing a news release from Turner Enterprises.

Turner owned professional sports teams in Atlanta, defended the America’s Cup in yachting in 1977 and donated a stunning $1 billion to United Nations charities. He married three women — most famously actor Jane Fonda — and earned the nicknames “Captain Outrageous” and “The Mouth of the South.”

He once bragged: “If only I had a little humility, I’d be perfect.”

He was slowed in later years by Lewy Body Dementia. Long since out of the television business, he concentrated on philanthropy and his more than 2 million acres of property, including the nation’s largest bison herd.

His garrulous personality sometimes overshadowed a driven, risk-taking business acumen. By the time he sold his Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner Inc. in a 1996 media megadeal, Turner had turned his late father’s billboard company into a global conglomerate that included seven major cable networks, three professional sports teams and a pair of hit movie studios.

Turner’s signature achievement was creating CNN, the first 24-hour, all-news television network in 1980. At a time news is instantly available at anyone’s fingertips, it’s hard to recall that the idea of letting consumers decide when they choose to learn what’s going on in the world was once revolutionary.

In part, Turner’s own frustration with television news was the instigator. He often worked past 8 p.m., after the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly newscasts had already gone off the air, and was in bed by the time his local stations did their own newscasts at 11 p.m.

He took a chance by starting the operation sometimes derided as the “chicken noodle network” in the early days of cable television, living in an apartment above its Atlanta office.

“I was going to have to hit hard and move incredibly fast and that’s what we did — move so fast that the (broadcast) networks wouldn’t have the time to respond, because they should have done this, not me,” Turner recalled in a 2016 interview with the Academy of Achievement. “But they didn’t have the imagination.”

CNN’s breakthrough moment came during the Gulf War with Iraq in 1991. Most television journalists had fled Baghdad, warned of an imminent American attack. CNN stayed, capturing arresting images of a war’s outbreak, with anti-aircraft tracers streaking across the sky and correspondents flinching from the concussion of bombs.

Turner was promised a continued role in CNN after his company’s sale to Time Warner for $7.3 billion in stock, but was gradually pushed out, much to his regret.

“I made a mistake,” he later said. “The mistake I made was losing control of the company.”

That same year — 1996 — saw the birth of Fox News Channel and arrival of a new dominant mogul in cable news, Rupert Murdoch. Political opinion became the stock in trade of networks like Fox News and MSNBC. Even though CNN built a worldwide news organizations particularly strong online, it struggles to this day with a diminished desire for straighter TV newscasts.

Robert Edward Turner III was born Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati. When he was 9, his family moved to Savannah, Georgia, where he grew up. After being expelled from Brown University for sneaking a coed into his room, Turner came to Atlanta to work as an account executive for his domineering father’s billboard company, Turner Advertising.

After his father’s 1963 suicide, Turner took over the company. In 1970, he bought an independent UHF station with a weak signal that didn’t even cover Atlanta.

On Dec. 17, 1976, he began transmitting the station to cable systems around the country via satellite. It became the TBS SuperStation. “It was the start of something bigger than we ever imagined,” Turner said in 1996.

TBS’ motley collection of old movies and “The Andy Griffith Show” reruns was augmented by Turner’s acquisition of baseball’s Atlanta Braves. Perennial doormats, the Braves slowly attracted fans across the nation through their superstation exposure and in the 1980s began declaring themselves “America’s Team.”

Turner, who early on donned a uniform and managed one game, helped open baseball’s free-agent price wars by signing pitcher Andy Messersmith.

In the 1980s, Turner went deeply into debt to buy MGM, a move again greeted with skepticism.

But the acquisition gave his company a huge library of vintage movies that eventually were parlayed into the TNT and Turner Classic Movies networks. His devotion to older movies earned Turner a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2004. He was also criticized for adding color to classic movies like “Casablanca,” which he said he did to make them appealing to a younger audience.

TBS also acquired the Hanna-Barbera animation library, which led to the launch of the Cartoon Network.

“He sees the obvious before most people do,” Bob Wright, former president and CEO of NBC, told The New Yorker in 2001. “We all look at the same picture, but Ted sees what you don’t see. And after he sees it, it becomes obvious to everybody.”

He revealed his ambitions as a younger man: “I used to tell people I wanted to become the world’s greatest sailor, businessman and lover all at the same time.”

Asked to share the secret to his success, he said: “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.”

For much of his life a partying roustabout who wooed beautiful women with a roguish charm, the lean, mustachioed sportsman married three times. He was married to Fonda from 1991 to 2001. She quit acting while married to Turner, but tired of his philandering and divorced him, although they remained friends.

“He was sexy. He was brilliant. He had 2 million acres by the time I left. It would have been easy to stay,” Fonda said of her relationship with Turner.

Turner had an unexpected friendship with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, bonding over hunting and arguments about politics over rum and cigars. A once bitter rival who compared Fox’s Murdoch to Adolf Hitler, they later reconciled over a mutual concern over the environment.

Turner built a sports empire, at one point owning professional baseball, basketball and hockey teams in Atlanta. He was best remembered at the helm of the Atlanta Braves, turning the doormats into postseason regulars by the 1990s. Their stadium, built for the 1996 Olympics, was named Ted Turner Field. The Braves replaced it in 2016 with a newer stadium north of Atlanta.

Perhaps Turner’s greatest love was for the land. He acquired millions of acres in ranches complete with roaming buffalo and was Nebraska’s largest private landholder. He spoke often of reviving the West’s bison herds, and in 2002 started a restaurant chain serving bison burgers, Ted’s Montana Grill. Researchers at Texas A&M University credited his donation of a few bulls in 2005 with helping increase the genetic diversity of the last herd of southern Plains bison.

He had a net worth of $2.5 billion in 2023, but had dropped off Forbes magazine’s ranking of the 400 richest Americans in 2021.

During a stock market bust, Turner’s net worth went from nearly $10 billion to about $2 billion in two-and-a-half years.

“To put this in perspective, I lost nearly $8 billion in 30 months,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Call Me Ted,” in 2008. “That means that, on average, my net worth dropped by about $67 million “per week,” or nearly $10 million “per day, every day, for two and a half years.”

He had enough time, and money, to devote to such lofty goals as promoting world peace and protecting the environment.

“See, my life is more an adventure than a quest to make money. Adventure is going out and doing something for the pure hell of it,” Turner once said. “You just want to see if you can do it, period. There’s no thought of gain other than your own satisfaction.”

Through the years, Turner’s antics occasionally overshadowed his business activities.

Fresh from skippering his boat “Courageous” to the America’s Cup title in 1977, a very inebriated Turner was captured by TV cameras stretched out on the floor at the victory celebration.

Turner managed to insult many with his shoot-from-the-lip style. An atheist since his only sister died of lupus at age 17, he called Christians “losers” and “Jesus-freaks,” later apologizing for both remarks.

He once suggested in a speech that unemployed Black people be used to haul mobile missiles with ropes “like the Egyptians building the pyramids.” After civil rights leaders demanded an apology, he said he was just joking.

Other times, his humor saved him from potentially awkward situations, like when he talked to an audience in Berlin in 1999. “You know, you Germans had a bad century,” Turner said, according to The New Yorker. “You were on the wrong side of two wars. You were the losers. I know what that’s like. When I bought the Atlanta Braves, we couldn’t win, either. You guys can turn it around. You can start making the right choices. If the Atlanta Braves could do it, then Germany can do it.”

Turner, father of five children, grabbed a leadership role in American philanthropy with his Sept. 18, 1997, pledge to give $1 billion, or $100 million a year for 10 years, to United Nations charities. Even as Turner’s fortune shrank after the AOL Time Warner merger, he continued giving money to the U.N., calling it the best hope for peace.

He promoted a range of humanitarian causes. Turner joined former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn to start the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to reducing the threat of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Turner fretted publicly about the world’s problems.

“If I had to predict, the way things are going, I’d say the chances are about 50-50 that humanity will be extinct in 50 years,” Turner said in 2003. “Weapons of mass destruction, disease, I mean this global warming is scaring the living daylights out of me.”

As he poured millions into nonprofits on a global scale, Turner was also fond of spreading his wealth in small ways. He once gave $500 to a volunteer fire department that helped extinguish a blaze on one of his ranches. Another time he lent personal paintings for an exhibit at a Bozeman, Montana, museum.

Former Associated Press correspondent Ryan Nakashima contributed to this report.

FILE - Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner holds up the World Series trophy on the field at Atlanta Fulton County Stadium after the Braves won the 1995 World Series, Oct. 28, 1995, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)

FILE - Actress and political activist Jane Fonda and media mogul Ted Turner arrive at a party in support of Proposition 128 in Los Angeles on Nov. 6, 1990. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon, File)

FILE - Actress Jane Fonda and CNN founder Ted Turner pose together at the United Nations Foundation Global Leadership Dinner, Nov. 6, 2013, in New York. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow, File)

FILE - Ted Turner is seen at his desk inside the CNN Center in 1982. (Nancy Mangiafico/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File)

FILE - Ted Turner speaks during the CNN World Report Contributors banquet in Atlanta on May 4, 1995. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)