Within the first 100 days of its war on Gaza, the Israeli military systematically destroyed every single university on the strip. International human rights monitors have found significant evidence that Palestinian scholars and intellectual figures have been targeted by Israeli strikes. The Israeli military has decimated Gaza’s education system and its infrastructure. This week on Deconstructed, Natasha Lennard, a columnist for The Intercept, fills in for Ryan Grim and speaks with Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina, the vice president of Israa University, one of Gaza’s most celebrated institutions of higher education and research. At the start of the war, Israel turned the university into military barracks, and later destroyed it in a massive, controlled explosion. In mid-November, Alhussaina fled Gaza; he has been able to escape to Egypt with his direct family members. Israel’s current war has killed 102 of his relatives. Alhussaina told Lennard about academic life in Gaza before October 7, the unending terror and desperation for Palestinians since the war began, and his hopes for the future of Palestinian intellectual life.

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