Bombed-out Gaza university becomes shelter for displaced Palestinians

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.

The families say they took shelter in the university because the U.N. schools-turned-shelters are already overwhelmed. More than 400,000 Palestinians across Gaza have been displaced by Israeli evacuation orders since it resumed its campaign, according to the U.N. Most have already been displaced multiple times during the war.

Like all of Gaza's 17 universities and colleges, the Islamic University has been decimated by Israeli bombardment and ground offensives over the past 18 months. Palestinians and several international academic groups have condemned it as "scholasticide," the systematic destruction of the territory's educational system.

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.

Their struggle to survive has worsened because Israel has cut off the entry of food, fuel, medicine and all other goods into Gaza for more than a month, straining the limited supplies of aid agencies on which nearly the entire population relies.

Israel says it has targeted Gaza's universities because Hamas militants use them for military purposes. It struck Islamic University several times saying militants launched attacks from the campus. It denies inflicting unnecessary damage.

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% 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.