Until the ongoing Israeli offensive, students made up about 4% of the Gaza Strip's population, a proportion comparable to that of the French population. The high rate of enrollment in higher education is a paradoxical consequence of the blockade that has been imposed on the Palestinian enclave since 2007, which prohibited the overwhelming majority of young people from studying outside of Gaza.
The opening of the first of the territory's 12 universities was the result of the 1979 peace agreement between Israel and Egypt – Egypt had previously welcomed a large number of Gazan students. But demonstrations in Gaza against the peace agreement, which brought no solution to the Palestinian question, led Egypt to close its campuses to Gazan students in retaliation. With the support of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), from which Egypt had been suspended, the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) was established, named "Islamic" in honor of the OIC.
All institutions attacked
The IUG has been gradually structured around 11 establishments, of which only two can be described as "Islamic" (religious studies and Islamic law); among the others are the faculties of science, finance, and education. The IUG remains a private institution, unlike the two universities created on the initiative of Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO): Al-Azhar University, with its campus in Gaza City, and Al-Quds Open University, which specializes in online teaching.
This public system is completed by Gaza University and Al-Aqsa University, which, in 2023, became the largest in the Palestinian enclave, with some 26,000 students. On the other hand, the more recently opened establishments are private, such as the University of Palestine, in Al-Zahra, the University College of Applied Sciences, whose pride is its start-up incubator, or Israa University, which opened in 2014 and whose museum of Palestinian history had been scheduled to be inaugurated... in 2024.
On October 11, 2023, four days after the Hamas terrorist bloodbath, the Israeli air force bombed the IUG campus, which was accused of contributing to the "production of weapons" for the Islamist militia – allegations that were never substantiated. On the same day, Al-Azhar University, despite its links to the PLO, was also hit. The strikes on it continued over the following weeks, ripping apart a perimeter wall covered with Arafat's portrait. On November 15, the Gaza branch of the Al-Quds Open University was bombed. In December, Israeli strikes destroyed Gaza University and, in the north of the territory, Al-Azhar University's Faculty of Agriculture, which had been set up by an endowment from the King of Morocco, Mohammed VI.
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