All universities in Gaza have been destroyed. What does this mean for Palestinians?

Australia Broadcast Center

14 hours ago

The Islamic University of Gaza was once a buzzing campus, filled with ambitious students studying everything from medicine to literature.
Now, displaced families huddle in its ruined classrooms, burning school books for kindling.
Israeli bombardment during the Israel-Gaza war destroyed its main auditorium; its rows of seats are now charred and crumpled.
Tents are pitched next to piles of rubble, in buildings that once housed esteemed scholars.
Among their alumni are award-winning poets, journalists, professors and — far more controversially — Hamas leaders.
According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the last remaining university in the Gaza region was destroyed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in 2024.
Wesam Amer is the dean of the faculty of communication and languages at another institution, Gaza University, and began his tenure there in 2020.
"We already have a generation lost in Gaza; a generation of students, a generation of academics," he tells ABC Radio National's Late Night Live.
He says the initial ground invasion in Gaza prevented students from attending campuses at the beginning of the war.
All levels of in-person teaching stopped in early November, 2023.
Dr Amer says he suspects Israel wants to eliminate the ability of Palestinian people to gain an education, "because education in Palestine, and for Palestinians, is existence".
"And existence is resistance as well," he says.
Dr Amer was forced to flee Gaza shortly after the war began and has been teaching online from the UK since May 2024.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led militants undertook a surprise attack in southern Israel, killing more than 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers, and taking around 240 hostage.
Israel's response has been an extensive bombing campaign and a ground invasion of Gaza which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says aims to "eliminate" Hamas. Gaza's health ministry says more than 54,000 Palestinians have been killed.
Even before the current war, universities were functioning under extreme conditions, says Mona Jebril, a Palestinian academic and research associate at the Centre for Business Research at Cambridge University.
Dr Jebril taught at University of Palestine and later Al-Azhar University between 2006 and 2012.
Like any professor, her days were spent preparing lessons, marking assignments and ensuring her students showed up on time.
However, Dr Jebril says she frequently experienced power outages in Gaza lasting between six to 12 hours.
They would happen so suddenly that she began to change her sleep schedule so she could prepare her lessons during times when the electricity came back on.
"And then I go to the university, and there is no electricity, so in the end I [couldn't] use it."
Her students also faced limitations from these power outages and would often question the relevance of subjects like philosophy to their reality.
"I remember one student once asked me, 'What is the relevance of Plato to Gaza? How would learning Plato improve our lives here?'," she says.
Many were more concerned with finding jobs than doing school work.
Data from the Journal of Economics, Finance and Management Studies shows youth unemployment is at 70 per cent in Gaza.
"Many know that they won't actually get a job because they have seen other graduates who are not able to find employment," says Dr Jebril.
Dr Jebril left Gaza in 2012 to study a PhD at Cambridge University in the UK and has not been able to return home.
She doesn't know which of her relatives, colleagues and students are still alive after the war.
"I constantly think about them … I don't know who's still alive or who actually has been killed," she says.
For many academics in the region, choosing to leave is a difficult decision.
Dr Amer says he was ultimately forced to leave Gaza because of the war.
"It was not … like a personal decision," he says.
He attempted to leave Gaza four times before he finally made it out. Dr Amer studied in Germany so he reached out to the German embassy, which agreed to help he and his family leave.
In November 2023, Dr Amer had to transport his wife, who was in her last month of pregnancy, and his two daughters to the Rafah crossing.
"We were the only people on the street, actually, and driving from Khan Yunis to Rafah, you can imagine the risks and the dangers we went through until we reached the Rafah crossing," he says.
Now Dr Amer is working as a visiting researcher at Cambridge University, and living with his family in the UK.
In a press release last year, UN experts expressed grave concern over the attacks on educational facilities in the Gaza Strip, including universities.
The IDF claims campuses, such as the Islamic University of Gaza, are used by Hamas.
"The [Islamic University of Gaza] was being used as a Hamas training camp for military intelligence operatives, as well as for the development and production of weapons," an IDF statement from October 2023 says.
Images of various weapons, explosives and other technological devices were also released by the IDF, which they claim were found at Al-Azhar University.
However, there has also been some criticism from within Israel of the attacks on Gaza, including their educational system.
In May 2025, more than 1000 academics released an open letter addressed to the leading Israeli academic institutions calling for an end to the conflict.
The letter criticises the "complete elimination of the educational system" in Gaza and highlights the role of higher education and academics in the war.
Based on their experience at the universities past and present, Dr Amer and Dr Jebril reject claims Hamas is affiliated with the insitutions.
"But this [Hamas affiliation] is not true because I've been working in Gaza since 2020, and I've been teaching, mainly at Gaza University and also at other universities. We have much independence in our universities," Dr Amer says.
He adds that focusing on quality research and educating students is the objective of these universities.
He believes the attacks are an attempt by Israel to suppress the intellectual expression of the Palestinian community and impede their recovery after the war.
"Israel tries its best to undermine Palestinian identity … [and prevents] restoring essential political and socio-economic conditions, because education is seen as a source of economic stability for many Palestinian families," he says.
The destruction of these universities also has significant implications for the preservation and transmission of Palestinian culture, Dr Jebril says.
She says that before the founding of the Islamic University of Gaza in 1978, Palestinians would have to go to neighbouring countries to study, where they would not learn about their cultural history.
She says the history of the Palestinian struggle for education is represented in the building of the universities.
"There is a history linked to the resistance of Palestinians that is connected to these spaces," Dr Jebril says.
"So destroying the university … is actually a destruction of the memory of the resistance of the past."
Despite the conflict, Dr Amer continues to teach and mentor his students, with many in Gaza depending on solar panels to power the few electronics they have at their disposal.
Three of the largest public universities in Gaza, Al-Aqsa University, Al-Azhar University and the Islamic University of Gaza, have formed an 'Emergency Committee' to ensure teaching continues and those in the region stay connected with the international academic community.
"Academics and students [are] really clinging to these opportunities to feel alive, to convey their voice, to represent their community, but also to keep their hopes," Dr Jebril says.
Methods of support include offering students virtual opportunities to continue learning.
Oxford University has granted students from Gaza and the West Bank access to the Bodleian Libraries.
"Which is really important because … all libraries and other resources are destroyed," Dr Jebril says.
Despite the destruction, Dr Amer hopes universities in Gaza will be able to rebuild.
"To move forward, we need coordinated efforts to rehabilitate infrastructure, provide mobile learning units, create digital academic libraries, and strengthen international academic solidarity," he says.
However, Dr Amer says supporting education in Gaza goes beyond restoring buildings and providing reading materials — it relies on the resilience of students in the face of significant psychological trauma.