Israeli strikes leave all Gaza universities in ruins

GAZA CITY

All 17 universities and colleges in Gaza have been destroyed over the past 18 months by Israeli airstrikes and ground offensives, with several international academic groups condemning it as "scholasticide," the systematic destruction of the region's education system.

The main auditorium of the Islamic University of Gaza is a gutted, burned-out wreck. Giant holes have been blasted through its blackened walls. The banks of seats are mangled and twisted.

And now the stage, once the scene of joyous graduation ceremonies, is crowded with the tents of the displaced.

The campus has become a refuge for hundreds of families in northern Gaza since Israel broke a ceasefire in March and relaunched the war.

Any sense that this was once a university is gone. Families have set up tents in lecture halls and classrooms. They take books from the library and burn them in cooking fires because they have no fuel. Kids run around in gardens reduced to fields of debris and mounds of earth.

Manal Zaanin, a mother of six, has converted a filing cabinet into a makeshift oven to bake pita bread, which she sells to other families. Her children and other relatives lay out the dough on mattresses in one of the classrooms.

Families pool their resources to buy fuel for tractors to bring in large containers of water. A makeshift market has been set up under the archway of the main gate.

One of the territory’s largest, the Islamic University of Gaza had some 17,000 students before the war, studying everything from medicine and chemistry to literature and commerce. More than 60 percent of its students were women.

The campus has been pummeled by airstrikes and raids by Israeli ground troops. Strikes have killed at least 10 of its professors and deans, including the university president, prominent physicist Sufian Tayeh, who was killed along with his family when their home was bombed and one of its best known professors, Refaat Alareer, an English teacher who organized workshops for young writers from Gaza.

At Israa University, troops blew up the main buildings in a controlled detonation, leveling them to the ground in January 2024. No campuses are functioning in the territory, though some universities, including the Islamic University of Gaza, conduct limited online courses.