Rebuilding Gaza’s higher education: Lessons from the void

How does educational leadership of Gaza’s universities at this time of war and crises differ from typical leadership elsewhere? What are the implications for academic practice? Why is this work important, and how can we support it?

Gaza’s universities have faced huge challenges in continuing to offer some form of higher education to nearly 100,000 students since the start of Israel’s ongoing war on the Gaza Strip. Their struggles and how we look to rebuild in the future are of relevance to educational leadership in other conflict-affected areas.

University leadership typically involves structured risk management and problem solving – negotiating budget constraints, faculty shortages, accreditation hurdles, policy changes, adapting to technological advances (such as remote learning) and responding to crises such as pandemics.

Educational leadership at Gaza’s universities has had to deal with all of these, as well as operate under conditions of occupation and prolonged siege for the last 17 years.

Since October 2023, however, higher education in the Gaza Strip has faced unprecedented challenges that have threatened its very existence.

Almost all of Gaza’s universities have been destroyed, completely or partially, leading to the loss of essential infrastructure, decades of hard work and investment, and academic, technical and financial resources, as well as disruption to teaching, learning and graduation for tens of thousands of students and the livelihoods of academic and administrative employees.

More than 97 academics have been killed in Gaza, including three university presidents and nine college deans.

Both staff and students who remain in Gaza continue to suffer from indiscriminate killings, from the possibility of life-changing injuries, multiple instances of displacement and other experiences of loss, fear, humiliation, disease, thirst and starvation; those who left Gaza are separated from their loved ones, mourning what they left behind while grappling with an uncertain future.

Permanent crisis mode

The current challenges that Gaza’s educational leadership is facing have gone far beyond problem-solving – they have become existential and permanent, necessitating a shift to survival management.

Gaza university leaders are continuously asking: “Is this lecturer still alive?”; “Is there electricity or internet to deliver teaching?”; “Can students enrolled on this course remain in one fixed place long enough to complete a module, or are they on the move?”; “After losing her hands, is she still able to type, to organise, to hold the system together?”; “Can starved students sit exams?”

These survival issues are not the same as administrative logistics. They don’t just slow or hinder higher education; they reset any progress made.

At a conference at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in April 2025, Dr Raed Al Hajjar – the Al-Aqsa University vice-president for academic affairs in Gaza, who, after leaving Gaza due to the war, is directing academic processes for his university from abroad – compared their efforts to maintain teaching and learning processes to someone rowing through the sea while desperately trying to grasp at a piece of string in the water; each time he grabs for it, it slips into the water, and he keeps searching for it, again and again.

Al Hajjar also explained that lecturers are facing huge and ongoing difficulty in maintaining any online connection with students in Gaza. Instructors often find themselves repeatedly asking during class: “Do you hear me? Do you hear me?” They hope for signs of connection yet often hear a reply from just one student, if any.

He likened the experience to someone who is calling out to a person who is trapped in a well, a metaphor that indicates the isolation and helplessness of students in Gaza.

The metaphor also speaks to the problems for educational leaders who work to support these students living in permanent crisis mode, which include stress, exhaustion, mental overload, grief, loss and additional time and effort that may not be required by typical educational leaders at universities around the world.

Many of Gaza’s university leaders remain in the Gaza Strip, trying to lead. Like students, they worry about their immediate safety and survival needs, live in tents, eat one meal a day and queue for hours to fetch some water on a daily basis.

Gaza’s universities are also suffering from a substantial financial crisis, particularly since they rely heavily on tuition fees to fund their operational costs and staff salaries, as well as their pensions.

This puts extreme pressure on leaders and staff, particularly since they and their families may not be able to afford the skyrocketing prices of essential goods in Gaza, if any are available at all as a result of the prolonged Gaza border closures by Israel and the destruction of livelihoods and community assets in the coastal enclave.

It is in this context and amid these extreme conditions that Gaza’s universities are continuing to operate to offer higher education to students in Gaza. But this context makes superficial and instrumentalist approaches to teaching and learning the norm because expecting quality higher education at this critical time has become an unattainable luxury or even irrational idealism.

Resisting erasure of higher education

While working to support higher education in Gaza might be perceived by many around the world as a matter of human rights, social justice and wider global development, for Palestinians it carries additional layers of urgency, including a national responsibility to resist the erasure of their past and present and to build a future for a new generation.

In fact, Palestinians’ dedication to their education and to higher education against all odds is a historical legacy. For example, during the first Intifada (1987 to 1990), Israel’s punitive measures against Palestinian schools and universities intensified. This included killings, injuries, expulsions, harassment and arbitrary closures of university campuses.

In my research on higher education at Gaza’s universities, one academic interviewee recalled how her “biology teacher took many of the teacher’s tools, including live cells, to her home”, which she turned into a small university space to continue teaching her students despite the university’s closure.

Mary W Gray (1990) also explains that during the Intifada, Palestinians continued to hold educational meetings with “the meeting place, maybe the home of the faculty member or a student, the back room of a shop, or even an automobile. A day may include several classes in widely separated locations, to which many faculty members will walk or catch buses or share taxis”.

Similarly, in their open letter to Al Jazeera in May 2024, the Emergency Committee of Universities in Gaza wrote: “We have come together as Palestinian academics and staff of Gaza universities to affirm our existence, the existence of our colleagues and our students, and the insistence on our future, in the face of all current attempts to erase us …

“We issue this call from beneath the bombs of the occupation forces across occupied Gaza, in the refugee camps of Rafah, and from the sites of temporary new exile in Egypt and other host countries.”

Educational leadership in Gaza and conflict zones can be a crucial frontline form of civic defence against aggression and ethnic cleansing.

Documenting and archiving as much as possible of the acts of leadership (lessons, decisions, challenges, adaptations and innovations) may be helpful when it comes to empowering educational resistance more generally, as well as challenging the stereotypical and neutral perception of learning, particularly in a war that was declared by the International Court of Justice on 26 January 2024 to be, plausibly, a genocide.

But it is important not to idealise the current educational leadership of Gaza’s universities and their capacity to respond collectively. My research has shown that even prior to Israel’s war on Gaza, there were limitations on leadership, and reform was required in several aspects (for example, in terms of representation, gender distribution, bureaucratic style, lack of collaboration and other areas).

Students’ motivation and determination to learn is a key driver of the continuation of such efforts, as is support from the Gaza community, the Palestinian diaspora and other regional and international solidarity initiatives.

Post-war reconstruction

The unprecedented challenges facing higher education in Gaza today, and later after the war ends, cannot be addressed by Gaza universities’ leadership alone, nor by conventional methods.

There is a need to empower educational leadership in Gaza and other conflict-affected areas to strengthen their ability to mitigate some of the challenges of widespread local collapse.

This includes supporting Gaza’s universities through global solidarity, sharing of expertise, funds and resources, and the establishment of twin systems with institutions, which may also involve diaspora scholars, to provide temporary relief and help higher education to continue. For other ways of supporting Gaza universities, see my policy brief here.

Lessons learnt from the experiences of educational leaders in this war should inform post-war reconstruction of Gaza’s universities. Some recommendations include:

• Decentralising educational infrastructure (for example, through modular curricula, mobile teaching kits and peer educators and distributing leadership both across the institution and in terms of geographical areas and specialisation as the result of the collapse of a formal hierarchy).

• Investing in offline-first learning tools (portable servers and low-tech back-ups).

• Enhancing collaborations and teaching across different institutions in terms of expertise and resources.

• Empowering sector leadership (for example, pre-coordination of emergency leadership through the Ministry of Higher Education and trusted non-governmental organisations in Gaza, the West Bank, and the Palestinian diaspora.

• Investing in mobile learning centres and digital hubs.

• Offering training in adaptive leadership and in risk and emergency management.

• Establishing working relationships between higher education leaders and leaders of other humanitarian organisations operating in the Gaza Strip, exploring ways to offer mutual support at times of war and crisis.

• Offering psycho-social and moral support to educational leaders across Gaza’s universities to strengthen their resilience and ability to endure, self-heal and support others during difficult times.

In their open letter to Al Jazeera, academics and staff from Gaza’s universities say: “Education is not just a means of imparting knowledge; it is a vital pillar of our existence and a beacon of hope for the Palestinian people.”

Despite commendable efforts to close the gaps in higher educational offerings to students in Gaza, as Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip continues, the efforts of educators are being constantly undermined, keeping them in a loop, circling the void, which gets larger every day.

Dr Mona Jebril is a research associate at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Business Research and a Bye-Fellow in education and academic development at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge. She is also host of the podcast A Life Lived in Conflict. More information about Mona can be found here.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.