Qasr al-Basha

A thirteenth-century Mamluk palace later occupied by Napoleon, used as a museum until 2023

Qasr al-Basha — the Pasha's Palace, also known as Radwan Castle or Napoleon's Fort — was a Mamluk-era fortified residence in the Old City of Gaza, built in the thirteenth century by Sultan Baibars. The two-storey limestone building was a rare survival of pre-Ottoman domestic architecture in Gaza, with thick walls, vaulted ground-floor chambers, and a small interior courtyard.

For most of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries it housed the Pasha's Palace Museum, with archaeological material gathered from sites across the Gaza Strip — pottery, mosaic fragments, glass, and inscriptions ranging from Bronze Age to Ottoman. The building was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in December 2023; most of the museum collection was reportedly lost.

things to do sight museum
A story
Napoleon Bonaparte slept here for three nights in 1799 during his campaign in the Levant, which is why the building is sometimes called Napoleon's Fort. Later it served as a police station under the British Mandate, then a girls' school under Egyptian administration, and finally as the Pasha's Palace Museum, displaying archaeological finds from across the strip.