For generations, this was the go-to store in the besieged Gaza Strip for books spanning from school literature to the Quran to Arabic translations of European literary masterpieces.

Last Tuesday, though, proprietor Samir al-Mansour watched in bewilderment as the bookshop and publishing business he had devoted his heart and soul into burned to the ground.

"Forty years of my life was destroyed in just a second," a guy in his fifties stated, holding a cigarette between his fingers and gazing at a heap of concrete, paper, and smashed plastic chairs.

"Within this rubble, there are 100,000 books," he claimed.

Mansour had been at home watching tv about 5:00 a.m. on Tuesday when the network announced that the Israeli air force was ready to attack the building that held his bookstore.

Mansour dashed over, but pulled to a halt 200 metres (220 yards) away from the structure, only in time to witness a missile destroy his life's work.

Mansour started working in his father's business when he was 14 years old, then inherited over in 2000 and quickly expanded into publishing.

Mansour was grieving everything that he had lost while rescue teams continued to seek for dead and survivors amid the ruins left by the military confrontation.

There were volumes of Islamic sacred texts, children's picture books, and a copy of Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov" buried beneath the wreckage.

"Had this had never occurred; my bookstore had never been damaged," he explained.

Montasser Saleh, his son-in-law, had come in Gaza from Norway shortly before the violence began and was with him as his life was flipped upside down.

More than a bookstore

Mosaab Abu Toha, a poet and the creator of the Edward Said library, which was established during the 2014 Gaza conflict, said the Gaza Strip has lost "one of its primary cultural treasures."

"Mansour was much more than a bookstore," he explained. "It was a publishing firm that published writers from Gaza."

"It was a literary method to relieve the barrier on Gaza," he remarked of the closure that has been in place since 2007.

This publishing business has printed roughly 1,000 copies of works by local authors like Ghareeb Askalani and Yusri al-Ghoul for Gaza readers.

Mansour would not be the first bookstore or stationery store that has been damaged by Israel's ongoing bombing.

The nearby town of Iqraa was also demolished, and the Al-Nahda stationery and bookshop was turned to a heap of crushed cinderblocks.

A billboard in front of what was left of Al-Nahda promised loyal clients that it will reopen shortly.

It said, "Ideas will never die."