More than a year ago, a donkey cart wound its way through heaps of rubble in Gaza. Three young men brushed ash from burned book covers and stacked salvaged volumes onto the cart, racing to save them from Israeli airstrikes and neighbors trying to burn them for fuel, unable to access cooking fuel due to the Israeli blockade.

Omar Hamad, 30, is a pharmacy graduate who never stopped being a reader. He has helped collect and preserve more than 5,500 books since 2025. Recently, his war-torn book drive has materialized into an unlikely new library in the Gaza Strip, where he and his friends have been organizing the books into a library management system, still being completed.

He gathered these volumes along with his friends, Hussam Hamad, 42 and Ibrahim al-Masri, 31, for what they’ve dubbed the Phoenix Library. The books were gathered by any means possible: pulled from rubble, purchased, or reprinted. The library opened on April 21st.

A donkey cart carrying Omar Hamad, children, and books.…