Gazan Heritage Professionals Abdul Latif Hashim and Haneen Al-Amassi Win 2026 Unesco/Jikji Memory of the World Prize

Key facts

• Unesco Director General Khaled El-Enany named Abdul Latif Hashim and Haneen Al-Amassi as laureates of the 2026 Unesco/Jikji Memory of the World Prize.
• The $40,000 prize was awarded on 4 September in Cheongju, Korea.
• Hashim and Al-Amassi are the first individuals to receive the prize since its establishment in 2004; it is usually awarded to heritage institutions.
• They were selected from 58 official international nominations, the highest number in the award's history.
• The pair established an emergency response team that rescued rare documents from beneath rubble, including holdings from the Medieval Great Omari Mosque Library in Gaza's old city, mostly destroyed by Israeli shelling in December 2023.
• Their efforts preserved and digitised more than 25,000 pages from the Mamluk and Ottoman periods, including Quranic manuscripts, legal, medical and literary works.
• Support came from the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme, and the team worked under the local NGO Eyes on Heritage, supported by the International Council on Archives.
• They established Gaza's first specialised manuscript restoration laboratory to strengthen local preservation capacities.
• Mariya Gabriel, Unesco's assistant director-general for communication and information, praised their exceptional efforts under extremely challenging circumstances.
• Jehad AbuHassan of Première Urgence Internationale (PUI) said manuscripts remain at risk and plans to work with Eyes on Heritage through PUI's INTIQAL programme to stabilise the library building and conduct preventive conservation.