Gaza bookshop owner, Samir al-Mansour's dreams, are buried under the rubble

For decades, it was the place to go for books in the blockaded Gaza Strip, from school texts to the Quran to Arabic translations of European literary classics.

But last Tuesday, owner Samir al-Mansour watched in disbelief as the bookshop and publishing house he had poured his life into went up in smoke.

"Forty years of my life were obliterated in less than a second," said the man in his 50s, a cigarette between his fingers, staring at a mound of concrete, paper and squashed plastic chairs.

"There are 100,000 books under this rubble," he said.

At around 5:00 am on Tuesday, Mansour was at home watching television when the channel reported the Israeli air force was about to hit the building housing his bookshop.

Mansour rushed over, but came to a dead stop some 200 metres (220 yards) away from the building, just in time to see a missile obliterate his life's work.

 Books are scattered amid the rubble of the Samir Mansour bookstore.

'Never happened before'

Mansour started working in his father's bookshop in the 1980s, when he was just 14 years old, then took over in 2000 and soon branched out into publishing.

As rescue workers continue to look for bodies and survivors in the rubble after the military conflict, Mansour was mourning all that he has lost.

Buried in the rubble were copies of Islamic religious texts, children's picture books and a copy of Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov".

"But this had never happened, my bookshop was never destroyed," he said.

His son-in-law Montasser Saleh had arrived in Gaza from Norway to visit the family just before the conflict started, and was with him when his life was turned upside down.

 A Palestinian woman walks alongside children past the ruins of the Samir Mansour bookstore.

 'More than a bookshop'

Mosaab Abu Toha, a poet and the founder of the Edward Said library started after the Gaza war in 2014, said the Gaza Strip had lost "one of its main cultural resources".

"Mansour was more than a bookshop," he said. "It was a publishing house publishing Gaza writers.

"It was a way to lift the siege on Gaza through literature," he said of the blockade on the Palestinian territory in place since 2007.

For Gaza readers, the publishing house had printed around 1,000 copies of the works of local authors such as Ghareeb Askalani or Yusri al-Ghoul.

Mansour is not the only book or stationery shop destroyed in the latest Israeli bombing campaign.

Nearby Iqraa was also levelled, and the Al-Nahda stationery and bookshop was reduced to a pile of pulverised cinderblocks.

In front of what remains of Al-Nahda, a poster assured loyal customers it would re-open soon.

"Ideas do not die," it read.