Tag: Gaza

Personal Reflections on Israel’s War on Education in Gaza

By Mohammedwesam Amer

Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza has decimated its education sector, leaving not a single higher education institution standing and turning schools into shelters for the displaced. In this essay, the author, himself a professor, dean, and father of school-age children from Gaza, reflects on the physical and psychological impacts of Israel’s scholasticide in the besieged enclave. Writing from Cambridge, UK, where he fled from the genocide, the author shares his experiences teaching students in Gaza from afar, the hardships he and others experienced as educators even before October 7, and some thoughts on how Palestinians can plan for their future.

Read the essay here.

Palestine: Spaces and Politics

By Arab Urbanism (Dena Qaddumi, Nadi Abusaada , Majd Al-Shihabi , Ammar Azzouz , Samia Henni , Lana Judeh , Faiq Mari, Aya Nassar, and Omar Jabary Salamanca).

Palestine: Spaces and Politics (PSP) is an open-access project that offers resources for education and research on Palestine’s built and natural environments through a critical lens. This initiative is a response to the growing demand for grounded academic resources on Palestine that offer depth and context beyond immediate colonial destruction. 

The PSP Introductory Curriculum positions Palestine as a complex space inhabited by people who are producers of its own knowledge, rather than a mere object on which perpetual violence is inflicted. It situates Palestine as a conceptual site to reconsider core ideas in the fields of architecture, geography, urbanism, and planning. Particularly, by foregrounding Palestinian voices and perspectives, PSP presents substantive and vivid understandings of Palestine’s past, present, and potential futures. Ultimately, the curriculum considers Palestine as imperative for analyzing the critical intersections of spaces and politics at large. 

The bilingual curriculum comprises several themes that include an opening text, key questions, key cases, and open-access readings. We also provide further readings and audiovisual material and have aimed to include resources useful for both academic and non-academic users.

Access their site here.

Are hospitals collateral damage? Assessing geospatial proximity of 2000 lb bomb detonations to hospital facilities in the Gaza Strip from October 7 to November 17, 2023

By Dennis Kunichoff, David Mills, Yara Asi, Sawsan Abdulrahim, Bram Wispelwey, Osama Tanous, A. Kayum Ahmed, Weeam Hammoudeh, Nadine Bahour, Mary T. Bassett, and P. Gregg Greenough.

After attacks in Israel led by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023, Israel launched a major military campaign in the Gaza Strip that has featured an unprecedented scale of destruction. This has included the use of highly destructive weapons in a densely populated area. Mark-84 bombs (M-84s) are 2000 lb air-dropped explosive munitions with the capacity to damage infrastructure and kill or cause severe injury hundreds of meters away. This study examines the proximity of M-84 bomb detonations to hospital infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. This article combined geospatial data on hospital locations across the Gaza Strip with maps of the locations of M-84 bomb craters between October 7 and November 17, 2023, published by CNN and New York Times. This study then measured and summarized the proximity of the bomb craters to hospitals across the territory. This article identified 592 M-84 bomb craters. Of the 36 hospitals across the Gaza Strip, 25% (n = 9) had at least one bomb crater within the lethal range (360 m) and 83.3% (n = 30) within the infrastructure damage and injury range (800 m) of their facilities. The shortest distance of a bomb crater from a hospital was 14.7 m. Two hospitals had as many as 23 and 21 bomb craters within 800 m of their facilities and one hospital had seven bomb craters within 360 m. Thirty-eight M-84 bombs were detonated within 800 m of hospitals in the Israeli military defined evacuation zone. Given the known blast effect of these M-84 bombs, the impact from the bomb detonations near hospitals likely killed and injured people in and around the hospital area, which could include civilians and hospital staff, and likely damaged hospital infrastructure. The results of this study suggest indiscriminate bombing in dangerous proximities to hospital infrastructure, which is afforded special protection under international humanitarian law (IHL)

Read the article here.

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