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Higher education in the Gaza Strip has been subjected to four wars and over a decade of blockade. University staff and students have been killed whilst campus infrastructure has been attacked, rebuilt, and destroyed again. This paper examines opportunities for, and limits to, protecting higher education from attack in Gaza. It presents a framework for categorising protection measures and empirically explores the effectiveness of measures to protect higher education from attack in Gaza since 2007. It finds that whilst Gaza's academics and students generally express hopelessness at protection under blockade and asymmetric warfare, there are promising potential avenues for protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on 36 in-depth semi-structured interviews with students and lecturers at Gaza's universities, this article explores the past and present higher education (HE) experience for educationalists in Gaza, and how this experience may be evolving in the shifting socio-political context in the Arab world. The research was conducted during the period 2012–2017 as part of an inductive PhD in Education study at the University of Cambridge. Combining Western theory and literature with Southern empirical data from the Gaza Strip, this paper reveals a simultaneous process of construction and destruction that continues to undermine the academic functioning of Gaza's universities. Highlighting this structure of 'de-development' is important in order to gain a deeper understanding of the Palestinian HE experience, and to empower academic reform at Gaza's universities and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]