Image: Grace Gay for Research Professional News
Researchers in Gaza and Israel are caught in the horrors of the current conflict
The death toll from attacks on Israel by Hamas on 7 October stands at 1,400, and over 8,000 people in Gaza have died after Israeli retaliatory strikes, according to figures quoted by the United Nations from the Israeli authorities and the Hamas-run ministry of health in Gaza. Research Fortnight has spoken to people in the research community in both Israel and Gaza about the events they have witnessed in recent weeks, and to their international research partners who are trying to offer support amid a horrific conflict.
Gaza
“The air strikes maybe you hear right now? Very close to where I am,” says Ahmad Ashour from the Gaza office of the Tamer Institute for Community Education. Moments earlier the call was interrupted by an explosion and the sound of crying children.
Ashour moved his family to Deir al Balah in the middle of the Gaza Strip after the Israel Defence Forces gave the order to evacuate Gaza City on 13 October. Since the attack on Israel by Hamas on 7 October, Gaza has been under near constant bombardment by the IDF. Airstrikes have not been limited to Gaza City. “No place is safe, actually, in Gaza,” Ashour says.
The Tamer Institute is a non-profit focused on supporting education for children and young adults in Palestine. It is a partner in a research network led by the University of Birmingham, which commissions research on humanitarian protection.
All the staff of the institute’s office in Gaza City have been displaced. One of Ashour’s colleagues, Mohammed Sami, was killed in the destruction of the al-Ahli Arab Hospital on 17 October, which caused international outrage, with both sides in the conflict blaming each other.
“He was playing with the children there all the time, doing campaigns with the children to clean the hospital, playing games with them in order to alleviate their stress,” Ashour says.
“The situation is horrible, the war is crazy, and we just call for the war to stop—we don’t look for anything else.”
He says the Tamer Institute has plans in place to offer psychosocial support to children in UN shelters but is unable to do so while Gazans lack basic essentials. There is no power, and drinking water and fuel are in danger of running out in much of the territory.
In a school next to a friend’s apartment where Ashour and his family are living he says there are 9,000 people sheltering.
“It’s horrible, I cannot describe how the people live inside the school. The people need to eat first, they need to wash themselves, then we can do what we do.”
For colleagues overseas, it is hard to know how to help. Nora Parr, a research fellow at the University of Birmingham and a co-investigator on the research network that includes the Tamer Institute and other Palestinian organisations, says the conflict has led to difficult questions.
The network is publicly funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and Parr says some Palestinian partners have pointed out to her that the UK has sent military assets to support Israel. Parr says the UK government is effectively providing funding for a mental health centre in Gaza via the network while “supporting a project that has demolished it”.
“That puts us in a very strange position,” she says. Her research network has awarded grants to the centre in question and trained 13 of its staff members in qualitative data collection. The Palestine Trauma Centre was damaged on the second day of the Israeli bombardment.
In the chaos of the bombardments it took nearly two weeks for the centre director to establish that most of his staff were safe. Parr says 35 members of the centre director’s own family have been killed.
“I’ve been working with Palestine for the last 25 years and this is the worst I’ve seen it. Everyone is terrified,” she says. “We are trying to preserve and protect the information that they’ve entrusted with us, to try and let the world know a little bit of what’s happening with them, because they largely cannot.”
She says the staff of the Palestine Trauma Centre will find a way to rebuild, if they can, while UK partners will “find ways to help the centre reconstitute itself so that that knowledge isn’t lost”.
Many buildings have been damaged as collateral due to the sheer scale of the bombardment. Some university facilities have also been directly targeted. On 11 October, the IDF said it had hit the Islamic University of Gaza, claiming it was being used as a Hamas training camp and as a weapons production facility. Gazan authorities also say the Al-Azhar University was “directly” bombed.
The IUG has research links with universities in the UK. On 16 October, over 100 staff members at Northumbria University wrote to their institution’s senior leadership urging action to support research partners in Gaza.
Ashour from the Tamer Institute says, “We ask all the writers, the artists, the people that we work with all around the world to advocate for the war to end.”
The end of the war will not be the end of the suffering though. “When we go back home…most of us will not find their homes,” he says. “Mine, for example, was severely damaged. This area has been bombed daily. I live next to al-Quds Hospital.”
Israel
Roughly two miles into Israel from the north-eastern corner of Gaza lies Sapir College, whose surrounding community was devastated by the Hamas attack. Israelis are still reeling from the atrocities committed on 7 October.
“We catch up at funerals,” says Amit Marantz-Gal. “That’s where we get to see each other, instead of on campus.”
Marantz-Gal is an English professor and the former director of Sapir College’s international office. She was not in the area during the attack—a day she calls the black Sabbath—when gunmen were seen at the college gates.
Hamas attacked on a Saturday when there were no classes, but many staff and students live locally, and 10 were killed along with 14 Sapir graduates. One student is thought to be among roughly 200 hostages kidnapped by Hamas fighters and taken to Gaza, along with the husband of one of Marantz-Gal’s colleagues.
“The institutional DNA for Sapir is all about social impact”, she says, with research that takes place at the college focused on what benefits the surrounding community.
“It’s not an ivory tower kind of institution, so really the devastation for us is unfathomable because homes and communities which are closely related to the college have been totally destroyed”.
She and other faculty members spent the days after the attack reaching out to the college’s 8,000 students.
“We mapped their needs, we put together a fund for employees, for staff, for students to take care of basic needs, and started thinking about trauma resiliency,” she says. “We’re dealing with everything: mental support, basic needs support, housing support, you name it.”
Living under threat has long been a reality for Sapir College, with rockets regularly being fired into Israel from Gaza. “We refer to it as a drizzle of missiles—this is the day-to-day life,” Marantz-Gal says. Her own car was destroyed in such an attack a few years ago.
Even so, she says the college has contacts in Gaza and that “the dream, the vision was to have the campus gates open to everybody”, although this was never fully achieved.
Further east in the desert city of Be’er Sheva lies Ben-Gurion University, the major research centre for the Negev region. Hamas attackers did not reach the university on 7 October, but many staff and students died on that day.
Danny Chamowitz, the university’s president, says there have been at least 53 deaths among the university community, with four students taken hostage and some people still not accounted for.
An hour before speaking with Research Fortnight, Chamowitz got a call telling him that a body had just been identified as the brother of a senior member of staff.
“For the past two weeks I’ve been going to condolence call, to condolence call, to condolence call, trying to get to as many of the families as possible,” he says.
“It’s a situation that no one could have imagined, and no [university] president imagined themselves dealing with.”
Ben-Gurion University has around 2,000 academics and administrative staff, and approximately 18,000 students. Many have now been called up as military reserves, both students and faculty members.
The Hamas attack happened shortly after new year in the Hebrew calendar, and just before the start of a new academic year. Higher education institutions across Israel have pushed the start of semester back to December.
“I won’t start the academic year when so much of my student body has been called up to the military reserves,” Chamowitz says, estimating the number called up to be over a thousand.
Research programmes have also been affected. Chamowitz says 250 foreign PhD students and postdoctoral researchers at Ben-Gurion University were instructed to leave Israel by their home countries.
With 40 per cent of postdocs gone, “that’s a massive blow to our research” he says.
Chamowitz says the university will recover but the war feels different from previous flare-ups between Israel and Palestine.
The university has had to “triple and quadruple our psychological and social services departments” to help people affected by the Hamas attack, he says.
Many of the over 200 people killed by Hamas at a music festival near the border with Gaza were college students.
“My daughter was at three funerals, my son was at two funerals—everyone knows someone who was at that party. This trauma is going to influence how we move forward.”
For Marantz-Gal it is crucial that Sapir College gets back on its feet, despite how severely affected it has been. The college is the largest employer in the western Negev and will have “a critical role to play in the rehabilitation of the entire region,” she says.
To do so, “we will need all of all the support we can get from partner institutions in Israel and across the world,” she says. “We will never be the same as humans, but we will, for sure, bring back our academic activity—we need it.”
Conflict timeline
7 October Hamas forces attack Israeli citizens and military forces on the ground and with mass rocket bombardments. 1,400 are killed and many taken hostage and Israel’s defence forces respond.
9 October Israel says there will be a “total blockade” of Gaza.
11 October Islamic University of Gaza bombed.
17 October Al-Ahli Arab Hospital destroyed with huge loss of life. Both sides blame the other for the explosion.
30 October Death tolls in the conflict pass 8,000 in Gaza and 239 Israelis and foreign nationals reportedly remain captive in Gaza.
This article also appeared in Research Fortnight and a version appeared in Research Europe
UPDATE 2/11 This article was updated to clarify that Marantz-Gal is the former director of Sapir College’s international office