A photograph of a flattened mosque or a burned archive settles nothing in law, and the question people actually ask is whether the loss has a name. It has one, and it requires three things at once: the Rome Statute of 1998 makes it a war crime to intentionally direct an attack against a building dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, or against a historic monument, provided it was not a military objective. On the counting side, UNESCO has verified damage to 164 cultural sites in Gaza as of 24 March 2026, up from 75 as of 29 November 2024, and it attributes that damage to nobody. The distance between an inventory that records damage and a forum that assigns criminal responsibility is where this question lives: the only heritage-destruction case carried to conviction at the International Criminal Court concerned ten buildings in one city, and none of the counts charged so far in the Gaza situation concerns cultural property at all.
Key Findings
- The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, adopted on 17 July 1998, requires three cumulative elements at Article 8(2)(b)(ix): the attack was intentionally directed, the object was dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes or was a historic monument, and it was not a military objective.
- UNESCO has verified damage to 164 cultural sites in Gaza since 7 October 2023, as of 24 March 2026, against 75 as of 29 November 2024. UNESCO’s assessment verifies damage to named sites and makes no attribution of responsibility and no legal finding.
- Israel ratified the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property and its First Protocol in 1957, on the depositary record, and has not ratified the 1999 Second Protocol. It signed the Rome Statute in 2000 and communicated in 2002 that it did not intend to become a party.
- Article 4(2) of the 1954 Convention permits its protective obligations to be waived “only in cases where military necessity imperatively requires such a waiver,” and supplies no threshold and no decision-maker. The 1999 Second Protocol narrows that waiver to property that has “by its function, been made into a military objective,” and binds only its own parties.
- The Israel Defense Forces’ Military Advocate General’s Corps reported on 3 August 2024 that it had opened 74 criminal investigations arising from the war in Gaza, 3 of them concerning alleged destruction of civilian property without military necessity, against more than 1,000 incidents referred for factual assessment.
When does destroying cultural heritage become a war crime?
Three elements must hold at once. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, adopted on 17 July 1998, makes it a war crime at Article 8(2)(b)(ix) to intentionally direct attacks against “buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments,” and adds the qualifier that decides most cases: “provided they are not military objectives.” Intent, protected character, and the absence of a military objective.
A second and older provision reaches destruction that was not an attack on a named building at all. Article 8(2)(a)(iv) of the same treaty lists as a grave breach “extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.” One turns on what was aimed at, the other on scale and justification. Article 8(2)(e)(iv) repeats the first formula for armed conflicts not of an international character, which is the clause under which the Court’s only completed heritage case was charged.
The 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict supplies the definition the criminal clauses assume. Article 1 covers “movable or immovable property of great importance to the cultural heritage of every people,” listing monuments of architecture, art or history, whether religious or secular, archaeological sites, groups of buildings of historical or artistic interest, manuscripts and books, and the museums and depositories that hold them.
Article 4(1) then imposes a duty that runs in both directions at once. Parties undertake to respect cultural property by “refraining from any act of hostility directed against such property,” and, in the same sentence, by “refraining from any use of the property and its immediate surroundings” for purposes likely to expose it to destruction or damage. The International Committee of the Red Cross records both limbs as customary rules binding in all armed conflicts, at Rules 38 and 39 of its 2005 study of customary international humanitarian law. That reciprocity is the hinge of every contested case: a protected site used for military purposes engages the exception, and the use is itself a breach by whoever makes it.
Who has said Israel committed this war crime, and when?
It is often said that Israel’s destruction of cultural heritage in Gaza has been found to be a war crime. That is a fair summary of what three bodies have published, and each is nameable and dateable.
The one closest to a finding is the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, which reported in June 2025 that in the majority of demolition cases it investigated, in particular demolitions carried out with explosives and bulldozers, Israeli security forces had committed war crimes, among them intentionally attacking buildings dedicated to religion and historic monuments and causing extensive destruction not justified by military necessity.
The same commission stated in a June 2025 press release that Israel had “destroyed over half of all religious and cultural sites in the Gaza Strip.” That sentence carries no site count and names no register.
PEN America, an organisation representing writers, published a report in September 2025 titled “All That Is Lost,” examining 36 cultural, historical, religious and educational sites and stating that the destruction of Gaza’s cultural sites, libraries, museums and universities amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Amnesty International, writing about southern Lebanon in August 2025, made a narrower claim in a different grammatical mood: that destruction of cultural property should be investigated as a war crime where it was carried out intentionally or recklessly. One body says the elements were met; another says the conduct warrants investigation. Collapsing those into a single position misstates both, and the difference between them recurs across the published findings on Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
The evidentiary standards also differ from those of a criminal court, and that is a matter of design rather than of rigour. Writing on the EJIL:Talk! blog of the European Journal of International Law on 18 September 2025, in a post that is editorially curated and not peer reviewed, Marko Milanovic set out the point directly: the “only reasonable inference” test comes from the jurisprudence of the international criminal tribunals and follows from the criminal standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt, and “other fact-finders are not bound to apply a high standard of proof,” a class in which he expressly includes a United Nations commission of inquiry.
How many heritage sites has UNESCO verified as damaged?
164 cultural sites in Gaza, as of 24 March 2026. That is the number UNESCO has verified as damaged since 7 October 2023 on its own impact assessment, across six categories of site, and UNESCO’s verification records damage to individually identified locations without attributing it to anyone and without reaching any legal conclusion about it.
The earlier reading, as of 29 November 2024, was 75 sites: 48 buildings of historical or artistic interest, 10 religious sites, 7 archaeological sites, 6 monuments, 3 depositories of movable cultural property and 1 museum. The March 2026 reading is 128 buildings of historical or artistic interest, 14 religious sites, 8 archaeological sites, 9 monuments, 3 depositories and 2 museums. The categories sum exactly to the two published totals, and almost the whole of the increase sits in one of them: buildings of historical or artistic interest rose by 80 of the 89 additional sites.
UNESCO states that its assessment rests on remote monitoring of satellite imagery analysed by UNITAR/UNOSAT, complemented since the ceasefire of 10 October 2025 by rapid on-site assessments where access allows. Two properties of the inventory matter for anyone using it. First, verification is a continuous process against a growing body of imagery and reporting, so a later total reflects both new damage and newly confirmed older damage, and the two cannot be separated from the published figures. Second, the categories are UNESCO’s own, and the count is of sites rather than of buildings, objects or collections, so it is not a measure of what was lost inside them. A depository holding an archive counts once.
Which cultural property treaties has Israel actually ratified?
Two of the four instruments in play bind Israel by ratification. On the depositary record held by UNESCO, Israel ratified the 1954 Hague Convention and its First Protocol in 1957, and it has not ratified the 1999 Second Protocol. On the record of the United Nations Treaty Collection, Israel signed the Rome Statute in 2000 and communicated in 2002 that it did not intend to become a party to it.
That produces an uneven map, and the map is the reason a report can cite four instruments and still owe the reader a further sentence about each. The 1954 Convention’s Article 4 obligations, including its waiver clause, apply to Israel as treaty law. The 1999 Second Protocol’s narrower waiver, its enhanced-protection regime and its own list of serious violations do not, because a protocol binds its own parties. The Rome Statute’s Article 8 is not binding on Israel as a treaty it has joined, and where the Statute’s wording is used to assess Israeli conduct it is being used either as a statement of customary law or as the standard a reporting body has chosen to apply.
The State of Palestine sits on the other side of that map. It acceded to the 1954 Convention and to both its Protocols in 2012, and it acceded to the Rome Statute with effect from 2015, which is why the Court’s jurisdiction over the territory is argued from Palestinian accession rather than from Israeli ratification.
Non-ratification is not the end of the analysis, and the customary route is what closes the gap. The International Committee of the Red Cross records the prohibition on attacks against cultural property and on its use for purposes likely to expose it to destruction as customary rules, at Rules 38 and 39 of its 2005 study, binding on all parties to an armed conflict irrespective of which treaties they have joined. What ratification decides is not whether any rule applies but which text’s wording governs the exception, and that turns out to be the whole argument.
What does imperative military necessity permit under the 1954 Convention?
One word does the work. Article 4(2) of the 1954 Hague Convention permits the protective obligations in Article 4(1) to be waived “only in cases where military necessity imperatively requires such a waiver,” and the Convention then supplies no definition of imperative necessity, no threshold, no ranking of military advantage against cultural loss and no body to decide.
The 1999 Second Protocol was written to fill exactly that hole, and its Article 6 states the terms. A waiver may be invoked to direct an act of hostility against cultural property only when and for as long as that property has, by its function, been made into a military objective, and there is no feasible alternative available to obtain a similar military advantage. The same article requires that the decision be taken by an officer commanding a force at least the equivalent of a battalion in size, and that effective advance warning be given whenever circumstances permit. Article 13 sets out how enhanced protection is lost, on a parallel test.
Those four conditions are cumulative, and they convert an open-textured excuse into a set of checkable facts: the function the property was serving, the alternatives available, the rank of the decision-maker, the warning given. That is the difference between the 1954 standard and the 1999 standard, and it is the difference that Israel’s non-ratification of the Second Protocol leaves in place. Against a party bound only by the 1954 text, the test remains the bare phrase “military necessity imperatively requires,” and the party asserting it is the party applying it.
The reciprocity in Article 4(1) survives the waiver clause intact. A protected site that has by its function been made into a military objective may lawfully be attacked under the 1999 standard, and the act of making it one is itself a violation of the same article by whoever did so. Both propositions are in the instrument, and each of them is a claim about facts that somebody has to establish.
Has any court convicted anyone of destroying cultural heritage?
One conviction, ten buildings. The International Criminal Court’s only completed heritage-destruction case, decided on 27 September 2016, concerned attacks on ten religious and historic buildings in Timbuktu, Mali, in 2012, and ended in a nine-year sentence on a guilty plea.
The accused was a member of a morality brigade that had occupied the city. The charge was brought under Article 8(2)(e)(iv), the non-international-conflict version of the clause set out above. A reparations order in 2017 set the convicted person’s liability at about 2.7 million euros.
The earlier record sits at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and it concerns the shelling of the Old Town of Dubrovnik, itself a World Heritage site, in December 1991. A naval commander was sentenced in 2004 on a guilty plea, and a ground commander was convicted in 2005 on counts including destruction or wilful damage done to institutions dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences, and to historic monuments, under Article 3(d) of the Tribunal’s Statute. Joseph Powderly’s chapter “Prosecuting Heritage Destruction,” in the 2022 Getty Publications volume Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities, sets out that prosecution history and the doctrinal questions the cases left open.
Two things about that record bear on the question asked here. The first is how narrow it is: in more than three decades of international criminal practice, the completed heritage-destruction cases arise from two cities, and in two of the three the accused pleaded guilty, which removes the contested element of intent from the proceeding entirely. The second is scale. The Timbuktu case concerned ten identified buildings, each attributed to identified perpetrators on an identified date, with the property’s non-military character effectively uncontested.
That is the shape of a heritage case that reaches judgment: a building, a date, an order, and an absence of military function that survives adversarial testing.
Which charges have prosecutors brought over Gaza so far?
Five counts are listed against Israeli office holders, and none concerns cultural property. The arrest warrants issued on 21 November 2024 for two Israeli office holders list starvation of civilians as a method of warfare and intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as war crimes, and murder, persecution and other inhumane acts as crimes against humanity. The warrant issued the same day for a Hamas military commander concerns the attack of 7 October 2023.
The other proceedings on the record reach the same result by different routes. The International Court of Justice delivered an advisory opinion on 19 July 2024 on the legal consequences of Israeli policies and practices in the occupied Palestinian territory, answering two questions put to it by a General Assembly resolution; its operative paragraph has nine separately voted subparagraphs, with recorded margins running from unanimous to eleven votes to four, and none of the nine concerns cultural property. The three orders on provisional measures in the case brought by South Africa, dated 26 January, 28 March and 24 May 2024, indicated eleven measures in total, every one of them addressed to the State of Israel, covering acts within Article II of the Genocide Convention, incitement, humanitarian assistance, the preservation of evidence, the Rafah governorate and access for investigators. Cultural property appears in none of them.
An advisory opinion is not a judgment and binds nobody; a provisional measure is expressly without prejudice to the merits; and an arrest warrant is an allegation on which nothing has yet been tried. What the charging record does establish is a fact about priority and proof. Across the counts charged, the measures indicated and the questions answered in 2024, the destruction of heritage is not among the matters any forum has been asked to decide, and the organisations that have published findings on it are not the bodies that would decide it.
So the reader’s underlying question, whether a forum has ruled that this destruction is a war crime, has a plain answer on the present record: no forum with jurisdiction has been asked to rule on it.
What does Israel’s own record say about protected sites?
The Israel Defense Forces’ Military Advocate General’s Corps reported on 3 August 2024 that 3 of the 74 criminal investigations it had opened over the war in Gaza concerned alleged destruction of civilian property without military necessity.
The other 71, in the same document, first published on 24 February 2024, concerned the deaths of detainees in IDF custody (44), alleged pillaging or stealing (13), alleged detainee mistreatment (8) and alleged illegal use of force (6).
These are the party’s own counts of its own processes, not independently verified.
One sentence from the same document has to travel with those numbers, because the numbers are a function of it. The Corps states that in armed conflict “death or injury to a civilian or harm to civilian objects, while tragic and regrettable, in most cases do not by themselves indicate a reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct, as they can be explained as reasonable aftermath of lawful operational activity.” On the same record, more than 1,000 incidents were referred to the General Staff’s Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism for factual assessment, with hundreds still in assessment at the time of writing. The 74 are investigations opened, not findings, indictments or convictions.
On the substantive question the exception turns on, Israel’s published record counts its warnings but not its targets. Israel’s Foreign Ministry, in a FAQ updated to 8 December 2023, states that Hamas operates from civilian sites and reports warning Gaza residents through over 15 million text messages, over 12 million pre-recorded calls, over 4.5 million leaflets and over 45,000 individual calls, and that “countless attacks have been aborted or avoided completely.” Those are the party’s own counts, cumulative and stated as floors. The same record publishes no count of strikes aborted, and none of sites assessed as having been made into military objectives.
That absence is the load-bearing one. Under Article 4(2) of the 1954 Convention, the party invoking imperative military necessity is the party that holds the operational record, and no Israeli government body publishes a count of cultural or religious sites struck, assessed for protected status, or cleared as military objectives. The three property investigations are the only figures in Israel’s own record that touch destruction of property at all, and the Corps’ own published ethical code states the standard against which they were opened: an obligation not to use weapons or power “to harm uninvolved civilians and prisoners,” which records the requirement rather than compliance with it.
Where do accounts of Gaza’s heritage loss disagree?
Two enumerations, no shared denominator. UNESCO’s 164 verified sites as of 24 March 2026 is an inventory of individually checked locations, while the formulation published in June 2025 that over half of all religious and cultural sites in the Gaza Strip had been destroyed carries no site count and names no register holding the pre-war total that such a share would have to be taken of.
The two claims are therefore not two readings of one quantity, and neither can be converted into the other. A share requires a denominator: a count, at a stated date, of the religious and cultural sites in Gaza before October 2023, on stated inclusion criteria. No such register is named by the body making the proportional claim, and none was located in the published record for this report. Recorded plainly, that is the finding: the proportional statement and the verified inventory measure different things, and the arithmetic between them cannot be done.
Three further choices move any count of this kind. Whether a site is counted once or by the buildings inside it. Whether partial damage counts alongside destruction; UNESCO’s categories record damage rather than loss. And whether the unit is a heritage site at all, rather than an institution.
A third kind of document sits alongside both. Librarians and Archivists with Palestine published a February 2024 compilation of damage to archives, libraries and museums in Gaza between October 2023 and January 2024, assembled from reports rather than from site verification, and it is an advocacy compilation rather than an inventory or a legal finding. Its unit is the institution, which is neither UNESCO’s unit nor the unit the Rome Statute uses. Those unit choices, the site, the institution and the building, make the published figures incommensurable.
Methodology and limitations
This report reads four kinds of record. Primary instruments supply the legal elements and the exception: the Rome Statute of 1998 at Article 8, the 1954 Hague Convention and its First Protocol, and the 1999 Second Protocol, each quoted from its own text. Depositary records supply which instruments bind which party, drawn from UNESCO for the 1954 Convention and its Protocols and from the United Nations Treaty Collection for the Rome Statute. An intergovernmental verification inventory supplies the site counts, from UNESCO’s impact assessment of cultural sites in the Gaza Strip at its 29 November 2024 and 24 March 2026 readings. A party’s own records supply the investigation counts and the military-objective assertion, from the Israel Defense Forces’ Military Advocate General’s Corps and the Israeli Foreign Ministry, labelled throughout as that party’s own counts and not independently verified.
Three limits follow from those choices. UNESCO verifies damage at site level and attributes no responsibility, so the inventory cannot answer a question about who caused any part of it or why. The conclusions published by the United Nations commission of inquiry, by PEN America and by Amnesty International are findings issued by those bodies, named and dated in the text, reached on standards of proof that are lower than the criminal standard by design, as Marko Milanovic set out on the EJIL:Talk! blog in September 2025. Israel’s investigation counts are counts of investigations opened, produced by the party under a stated threshold that its own document publishes, and they are not counts of findings.
Where the record disagrees, the disagreement is named rather than resolved. The commission’s proportional statement and UNESCO’s verified inventory rest on different units and different bases, and no publisher reconciles them.
One gap is recorded as a gap. No count of cultural or religious sites in Gaza struck, assessed for protected status, or cleared as military objectives appears in any Israeli government publication consulted for this report, and the four conditions in Article 6 of the 1999 Second Protocol, which would make such assertions checkable, bind only that Protocol’s parties.
Conclusion
So does the loss have a name in law? It has three, and they arrive together. The treaty texts are old, specific and unusually clear about what must be shown: that the attack was intentionally directed, that the object was of the protected kind, and that it was not a military objective. Everything else in this question is an argument about who establishes those three facts and on what standard.
Read across every axis measured here, the record is uneven in a way the shorthand hides. The inventory is dated, category-level and growing, from 75 sites at the end of November 2024 to 164 by March 2026, four fifths of the increase in a single category. The instrument that would narrow the necessity exception into four checkable conditions was written in 1999 and Israel has not ratified it, leaving a bare phrase from 1954 to govern, applied by the party invoking it. The bodies that have published war-crimes conclusions are three, they are dateable, and they differ from each other on whether the elements were met or the conduct warrants investigation. The prosecution record for heritage destruction anywhere in the world runs to two cities, ten buildings and three defendants, two of whom pleaded guilty. And across the warrants, the orders and the opinion issued in 2024 over Gaza, cultural property is named in no count and no measure, while the party’s own file records three property investigations out of 74, against more than a thousand incidents referred for assessment.
Which leaves a question the documents raise and none of them answers. A heritage case that reaches judgment needs a building, a date, an order and an absence of military function that survives cross-examination, and the records now in existence are built for other purposes: an inventory that verifies damage without attributing it, an investigation file that opens on a threshold its own author states, an assertion of military use that counts warnings and not sites. What kind of record would have to exist, and who would have to keep it, before a count of 164 sites could become a charge about one of them?
Frequently Asked Questions
Which treaty first protected cultural property in war?
Article 27 of the 1907 Hague Regulations already required that in sieges and bombardments all necessary steps be taken to spare buildings devoted to religion, art and science, and historic monuments. The 1954 Hague Convention was the first instrument devoted entirely to the subject, and it supplied the definition of cultural property that later criminal clauses assume.
Why does it matter whether Israel ratified the 1999 Second Protocol?
Because the Protocol changes what the necessity exception requires. Under Article 4(2) of the 1954 Convention the test is the bare phrase “military necessity imperatively requires,” with no threshold and no decision-maker named, while Article 6 of the 1999 Second Protocol requires that the property have by its function been made into a military objective, that no feasible alternative exist, that the decision be taken by an officer commanding a force at least the size of a battalion, and that effective advance warning be given whenever circumstances permit. Those four conditions bind only the Protocol’s parties.
How does UNESCO verify that a site was damaged?
UNESCO’s assessment records damage to individually identified locations, grouped into six categories, and publishes the total as at a stated date. Its verification attributes the damage to nobody and reaches no legal conclusion about it, so the inventory records what has been confirmed rather than who caused it.
Why do a site count and a percentage of sites destroyed not add up?
A share requires a denominator, and the proportional statement published in June 2025 that over half of Gaza’s religious and cultural sites had been destroyed names no register holding the pre-war total. UNESCO’s 164 is a count of verified damaged sites at a date. The two measure different things on different units, and no publisher reconciles them.
Which conduct does the Rome Statute treat as a grave breach rather than an attack?
Article 8(2)(a)(iv) lists extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly, as a grave breach. That clause turns on scale and justification rather than on what was aimed at, which is what Article 8(2)(b)(ix) addresses, and prosecutors have used the two for different fact patterns.
Does using a protected site for military purposes breach the same rule?
Yes, on the text. Article 4(1) of the 1954 Convention requires parties to refrain from acts of hostility against cultural property and, in the same sentence, to refrain from any use of the property or its immediate surroundings for purposes likely to expose it to destruction or damage. The International Committee of the Red Cross records both limbs as customary rules, at Rules 38 and 39 of its 2005 study.
How long did the only completed ICC heritage case take?
The attacks on ten religious and historic buildings in Timbuktu occurred in 2012, the conviction and nine-year sentence followed on 27 September 2016, and the reparations order setting liability at about 2.7 million euros came in 2017. The accused pleaded guilty, which removed the contested element of intent from the proceeding.
What do Israel’s own investigation figures cover?
The Military Advocate General’s Corps reported on 3 August 2024 that it had opened 74 criminal investigations arising from the war in Gaza, 3 of them concerning destruction of civilian property without military necessity. These are the party’s own counts of investigations opened, not of findings, indictments or convictions, and the Corps’ own published threshold states that civilian harm in armed conflict in most cases does not by itself indicate a reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct.
Sources
- International Committee of the Red Cross, 2005. Customary International Humanitarian Law, Rules 38 and 39 (attacks against cultural property; use of cultural property for military purposes). Monitoring organization, treaty custodian.
- International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, 2004 and 2005. Judgments concerning the shelling of the Old Town of Dubrovnik, December 1991. Court record.
- Israel Defense Forces, Military Advocate General’s Corps, 2024. Addressing Alleged Misconduct in the Context of the War in Gaza, published 24 February 2024, updated 3 August 2024. Official record, a party’s own reported counts.
- Israel Defense Forces. The Spirit of the IDF: the ethical code and its values. Official record, a party’s own published doctrine.
- Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2023. Hamas-Israel Conflict 2023: Frequently Asked Questions, updated to 8 December 2023. gov.il. Official record, a party’s own position and counts.
- Milanovic, M., 2025. Proving Genocide. EJIL:Talk!, the blog of the European Journal of International Law, 18 September 2025. Named-author commentary, not peer-reviewed.
- PEN America, 2025. All That Is Lost. September 2025. pen.org. Advocacy organization, named in text only.
- Powderly, J., 2022. Prosecuting Heritage Destruction. In J. Cuno and T. G. Weiss, eds., Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities, chapter 25. Los Angeles: Getty Publications. getty.edu. Scholarly book chapter.
- Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1998. Articles 8(2)(a)(iv), 8(2)(b)(ix) and 8(2)(e)(iv). Primary record, treaty text.
- Second Protocol to the Hague Convention of 1954 for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, 1999. Articles 6 and 13. Primary record, treaty text.
- Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, 1954, and its First Protocol. Articles 1 and 4. Primary record, treaty text; ratification record from the UNESCO depositary.
- Hague Regulations, 1907. Article 27. Primary record, treaty text.
- UNESCO, 2026. Impact on cultural heritage: damage assessment of cultural sites in the Gaza Strip, readings as of 29 November 2024 and 24 March 2026. unesco.org/en/gaza/assessment. Intergovernmental verification inventory.