A group of Palestinian engineers living in the Israeli-blockaded Gaza Strip have decided to protect the country’s landmarks in their own way from ‘Judaisation and extinction’ by bringing the country’s landmarks to life using three-dimensional technologies.
The team, who has been designing historical buildings in the country for about two years, has so far produced 22 models of historical constructions, including artefacts of the Mamluk and Ottoman periods and those buildings that, alas, no longer exist.
Engineer Tariq el-Omer told the Mecra online edition that the building models were made in accordance with historical monument designs and were first drawn in a computer environment as 3-D objects.
Among the models developed: the al-Aqsa holy mosque, the Mamluk-period Madrasa Manchikiye, built in 1631 and located within the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, the Manchikiye Madrasah in the Sheikh Zerra area, occupied in 1897 during the Ottoman Empire. Engineer Omer said that since 2020, they had created 22 models: ‘The first stage of the project was to collect information about the structure to be converted into a model, engineering plans and images’.
After the information-gathering stage, the computer modeling process began. It was necessary to draw an identical model to the real one. Omer said that they intended to study all the archaeological structures in the occupied Palestinian cities and villages.
Engineer Husain Naeem, Omer’s counterpart, said that primarily the models had been constructed from simple cardboard. Clay was used too in order to highlight the texture of the natural material used in construction.
Naeem said the most challenging part of making the model was the process of finding information about a building, because not all the structures are documented. He said the idea of modeling historical buildings in the Palestinian territories ‘coincided with Israel’s 2019 escalation of attacks on historical buildings and occupied cities in Jerusalem to Judaize or demolish them’.
‘We want to open a permanent exhibition and hope that many historical buildings in the country will be modeled so that every visitor to the exhibition feels that they live in the Palestinian cities and villages. By the art we are also warning the Palestinians of the danger of further Judaization or destruction of these works of art,’ Naeem said in his interview. He reminded that before the Israeli occupation Palestinian cities had a very beautiful aesthetic, but in 1948, in an attempt to destroy the urban identity of Palestine, the military managed to destroy some villages with their historical constructions.
A creative team of Palestinian engineers has already taken part in two exhibitions organized by the Palestinian Cultural Foundation and the Committee for Youth Affairs and Sports in 2021.