Over the past month, I should have been welcoming students to Al-Aqsa University in Gaza. Instead, I find myself teaching online from a crowded internet café, connecting whenever the internet allows – sometimes in brief moments of calm, accompanied only by the hum of a generator and the click of keyboards, and sometimes amid sudden chaos: evacuating on short notice after warnings, navigating intermittent blackouts, or teaching while drones buzz overhead and ambulance sirens wail in the distance.
The university campus has been destroyed; the library reduced to rubble, the classrooms flattened. News of loved ones killed or injured reaches me constantly; so far, 41 members of my extended family have been killed. Yet life and work press on, even as the Israeli ground invasion into Gaza City unfolds around us.
