Every morning, for several hours, you will find Rami Salameh hunched over a desk to restore a number of ancient manuscripts located in a historic library in east Jerusalem.

Salameh, a local Palestinian man in his forties, told Xinhua that he launched his individual initiative about two-and-a-half years ago in order to preserve the books and manuscripts in the Khalidiya Library in Jerusalem, which hold insights about the period of the city before it was taken over by Israel.

The Al-Khalidiya Library is one of the largest Arabic libraries in the city of Jerusalem. It was established in 1900 inside part of an old, Mamluk-style residential building from the 13th century. It was owned by the Al-Khalidi family, who used to live in the city.

Salameh explains that the library contains more than 1,200 ancient manuscripts, dozens of which are over 1,000 years old, which documented the lives of the city's residents throughout history. 

His main motivation is to show what life was like in Jerusalem before Israel's occupation, and to refute the accounts that the city was empty – what he describes as "systematic attempts to obliterate its Arab history."  

He notes that an Israeli court even ruled that a religious Jewish school to acquire part of the library, though the total takeover was prevented by testimonies by left-wing Jewish academics about the importance of the collection to Arab history. 

In light of these threats, Salameh didn't want to waste any time, and began restoring and digitizing the manuscripts himself. Their subjects range from Persian to Ottoman history, from astronomy to the Koran.

He has already began on 11 manuscripts, and seven others in other libraries.