Location and date of discovery
The church is located northeast of Gaza City, within the municipal boundaries of the city of Jabalia in the North Gaza Governorate, west of the Salah al-Din Road. [3] The church includes a number of inscriptions recording the names of those who contributed to the church. The earliest dates to 444 AD, [4] during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius II (408–450)
The Byzantine Church in Jabalia is considered one of the most important churches in the Levant. Since Islam conquered Palestine in 637 AD, the Church continued to exist until the Abbasid Islamic era, the era of the Caliph (Abu Jaafar al-Mansur). Christians and churches in the period of Islamic rule in Palestine include 16 ancient Greek texts, and this number cannot be found in any church in the Levant.
The church's decoration contains a large number of geometric and floral decorations, figure paintings, rural scenes, cooking utensils, domestic animals and predatory animals from Palestine and abroad, and various types of tuna. It also includes hunting scenes, rivers, and palm trees, but most of these decorations were destroyed during the iconoclastic war (107–252 AH/726–867 AD), and there were no traces of these decorative elements that could be recovered or repaired.
The church is built on the cathedral system, and there are three porticoes, the widest of which is the middle portico, and there is a church on the northern side of the church. This is the nature of the Palestinian architecture of the church, which covers an area of 500 square meters.
The church is divided into three sections: the first is the church building where the prayer ceremony is held, the second is the small church, and the third is the baptismal aisle. [2]
The remains of the church were discovered in 1997 during reconstruction works on the Salah al-Din Road; [5] [4] archaeological investigations followed involving the École Biblique. [6]
The church has been damaged at various points during the Gaza–Israel conflict: in 2003, 2014, and 2021. [7] In 2010, the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities installed a canopy to protect the mosaic floor from erosion. A restoration project involving international partner organisations began in 2019; [8] it was completed in January 2022 when the church reopened to the public. [5]
In November 2023, a report by Heritage for Peace on the impact on cultural heritage sites of the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip included the church as a site that was completely destroyed by shelling. [9] In January 2025, archaeologist Fadel AlUtol reported that while there was debris at the archaeological site that the mosaics were still intact. [1]
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