Pursuing a scientific career in the Palestinian territories has been fraught for decades. Then Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, igniting a war in the Gaza Strip that has lasted for more than a year.
As Israel has bombed and invaded Gaza in a campaign to eliminate Hamas, schools have been destroyed and students have had to continue their studies remotely or stop them altogether. Physicians have worked in ever-worsening conditions. And Palestinians outside the territory, too, have felt the effects.
The New York Times spoke to four Palestinians living in Gaza, the West Bank and abroad about the conflict that looms over their scientific research and medical work.
Wafaa Khater, 49
Wafaa Khater grew up in the West Bank, an area west of the Jordan River that has been occupied by Israel since 1967. She moved to Norway to pursue her Ph.D. in physics at the University of Bergen.
She had the opportunity to stay in Norway permanently, but moved back to the West Bank to teach in the early 2000s, during the Palestinians’ second uprising against the Israeli occupation. “All my Norwegian colleagues at the time told me, ‘Are you crazy?’” she recalled. “But I told them, ‘It’s home, and I am on a mission.’”
Now a professor at Birzeit University, Dr. Khater is one of the first Palestinians to pursue a career studying the nature and the behavior of subatomic particles. “Many people have never imagined that there is science going on in Palestine,” she said. The absence of a healthy research community in the Israeli-occupied West Bank limits her opportunities for scientific collaboration, she added, so she has sought to build a network. She has invited European colleagues to speak at West Bank universities, and pushed for Palestinian physics students to attend summer research programs abroad.
Theoretical research can flourish in the West Bank, but “experimental physics has almost no chance,” she said. Universities struggle to pay for laboratory equipment and infrastructure, she explained, and rely on donations. Birzeit’s observatory, which opened in 2015 and is one of few astronomical facilities in the West Bank, was endowed by Ramez Hakim, a Palestinian American businessman.
“It was the first time that our students could see a telescope and look up to the sky,” Dr. Khater said.
Even when funding is secured, experimental tools can be difficult to import into the West Bank and Gaza, because some equipment needed for research can also be used for military purposes. Israel classifies such goods as “dual use” and requires special permission for civilians in the Palestinian territories to procure them.
After Oct. 7 last year, Dr. Khater and other faculty members at her university began teaching remotely. Increased checkpoints in the West Bank, a result of heightened Israeli military presence after Hamas’s attack, made it difficult for students and professors to attend class in person, she said. Limited face-to-face instruction resumed last spring. But in October, shortly after Iran launched a missile attack on Israel that caused shrapnel to fall over the West Bank, Birzeit announced that teaching and administrative duties would be moved online for safety.
Dr. Khater spent the summer teaching an online physics course for students in the Gaza Strip. Nineteen students registered, she said, but more than half dropped out because they lacked stable electricity or internet access.
“I don’t belong to any political party in Palestine,” Dr. Khater said. “But the situation affects us in every single part of our lives.” She feels it is her duty to teach the next generation of Palestinian scientists, who may otherwise lack a connection to the outside world.
“We want to do science,” she said. “The same as everybody else.”
Osaid Alser, 32
In 1948, Dr. Osaid Alser’s family moved to Gaza from Hamama, a village on land that is now a part of Israel. A general surgery resident and researcher in Texas, Dr. Alser completed medical school in Gaza in 2016, studied at Oxford University for some time, and then moved to Harvard University in 2019 to conduct research on emergency trauma surgery.
Studying in Europe and the United States is different from what it is like in Gaza, he said. Unlimited access to electricity, water and internet is a given abroad, and travel is, for the most part, unrestricted. “That was shocking to me,” he said.
In Gaza, Dr. Alser’s parents chose where to live based on where they would have the most stable internet access, so that he and his brothers could pursue their studies. For electricity, they had a generator. If its gas ran out, they relied on solar panels, candles and batteries.
Big research groups are rare in Gaza, he said, because limited resources hinder the ability to do science. Experiments require certain equipment, and sharing successful results requires knowing how to write and submit a paper, as well as having the chance to present that work to other scientists.
Studying abroad offers more opportunities. To do so, Dr. Alser had to apply for permits with governments in Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Gaza. The process can take months, he said, and many people give up. “You see so much loss of hope in Gaza,” he said.
It took him three tries to gain admission to Oxford. He applied for nearly 20 scholarships and won one. With Harvard, he just kept applying. That persistence, Dr. Alser said, is something he learned from living in Gaza.
Dr. Alser was in Texas on Oct. 7. But his family was back home in Gaza, living near Al-Shifa Hospital. Last year, Israel raided Al-Shifa, saying that the complex was being used as a secret Hamas command center. Without stable electricity in Gaza, Dr. Alser was unable to reach his mother or brothers for hours.
“I was really scared,” Dr. Alser said. “I really felt that I’m going to lose my family.”
Dr. Alser’s immediate family has since moved south, and their homes in Gaza have been destroyed, he said. He has continued his medical training in Texas.
“It’s definitely hard, but sometimes I have to work to distract myself,” Dr. Alser said. “Listening to what’s going on, it’s just very, very heartbreaking.”
Duha Barghouthi, 25
Dr. Duha Barghouthi, a general practitioner in the West Bank, studied medicine for six years at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem. She finished her intern year, or postgraduate training, in October of last year, one week before the war broke out.
Al-Makassed, the hospital in Jerusalem where Dr. Barghouthi trained, was only a few minutes’ walk from her home. But even before the war, she had to leave hours early to navigate through the required checkpoints to make it to work on time. After Oct. 7, Israeli soldiers raided Al-Makassed, arresting Gazan patients and their relatives.
“We have no clue what happened to them,” Dr. Barghouthi said. “It’s very traumatizing. It’s very cruel.”
In a statement on social media, the Israeli police said that it had arrested a handful of residents from Gaza for “hiding and sleeping” at Al-Makassed without admission to the hospital. One of the arrested, the police said, “is the sister of an operative in the military arm of the Hamas terrorist organization.”
Last October, Dr. Barghouthi’s father, Imad, an astrophysicist at Al-Quds University, was arrested and placed in administrative detention, a practice used to hold Palestinians without formal charges, for the fourth time. After his first arrest in 2015, the Israeli authorities barred him from leaving the West Bank, which Dr. Barghouthi said restricted his opportunities for scientific collaboration.
She remembers the night of the latest arrest clearly. It was 3 a.m.; she was up late studying while the rest of her family slept. A text from her neighbor alerted her that their home was surrounded by soldiers and dogs. Dr. Barghouthi’s father was handcuffed and taken away.
In a statement to The Times, the Israeli military said Imad Barghouthi was arrested because of suspicions of “membership and activity in an unlawful association, incitement and engaging in activities that endanger the regional security.”
The astrophysicist has stated that he is neither an affiliate nor a supporter of Hamas. Marwan Barghouti, an imprisoned Palestinian leader, is a distant family relative, but Dr. Barghouthi believes that the arrest of her father was unconnected. She added that her immediate family did not belong to any political parties or militant groups.
“That accusation hurts my heart,” she said.
Six months after the arrest, her father was released in what Dr. Barghouthi described as “terrible health conditions,” including severe weight loss, suspected broken ribs and nerve damage in his fingers.
“I don’t wish this to happen to my enemies, to happen to anyone,” she said. “My father is a very passionate man, but you can tell from his eyes that something has changed.”
In August, Dr. Barghouthi married, an event she had postponed last year because of the war and her father’s arrest. She is now searching for a new job.
“Honestly, it’s the best thing to be unemployed at this time,” she said. “I want to stay close to my family.”
Rami Morjan, 50
Rami Morjan, an organic chemist at the Islamic University of Gaza, described his career as a road full of obstacles, with years spent trying to establish a research group and few scientific instruments or chemicals with which to conduct sophisticated experiments. “We have no infrastructure for research,” he wrote in a text to The Times.
Dr. Morjan focuses on creating new compounds with potential applications in antibacterial, antifungal and anticancer drugs. He uses multi-step synthesis, a technique in which a starter compound undergoes a series of chemical reactions to transform it into the final desired product. This process requires solvents and instruments to identify the chemical structure of the compound at each step, but, because many of these tools are considered dual-use equipment by Israel, Dr. Morjan and his colleagues are unable to properly do that.
“We just assume we have made the necessary compounds,” he said, adding that once the process was complete, his team sent the product outside Gaza to determine if they were successful. “This is really a nightmare,” Dr. Morjan said, because it takes a lot of time and effort.
Dr. Morjan has managed to publish some of his work in academic journals. But he admitted that the lack of resources in Gaza has limited his research output compared with that of his colleagues abroad.
He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester in 2004, and then moved back to Gaza. “I wanted to transfer the experience and knowledge to my people,” he said. Last year, the Islamic University of Gaza, accused by the Israel Defense Forces of being a training camp for Hamas, was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes. Dr. Morjan’s teaching and research have since come to a halt.
The violence forced him to evacuate his home in Gaza City and relocate to Deir al Balah, a city in the central part of Gaza that recently came under fire as Israel’s military targeted what it said were Hamas “command and control centers” there.
Dr. Morjan acknowledged that his decision to return to the enclave had prevented him from achieving his dreams for a scientific career. But he had no regrets, he said: Gaza “is the most beautiful place, a small part of my homeland.”
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