It has been a year now of Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip. Israeli aircraft, tanks and warships have been indiscriminately bombarding the whole Strip. All aspects of life have been tremendously impacted. Tens of thousands of civilian buildings have been destroyed, including houses, schools, universities, mosques, churches, hospitals, bakeries, and United Nations shelters.

Brutal Israeli attacks, along with the illegal inhumane blockade, have spared no Palestinian. The official death toll stands at nearly 42,000, with about 100,000 injured and 10,000 missing. The majority of the casualties are women and children.

Although I have never been affiliated with any militant or political group, my own house was destroyed by an Israeli warplane on October 23, 2023. Since then, I have been living with my large family in deplorable conditions at a UN school shelter.

Besides the trauma of homelessness and displacement, we were devastated by the loss of my beloved mother. She fell ill and could not receive the medical care she needed because the Israeli military has largely decimated Gaza’s healthcare system. Her condition deteriorated, and she passed away on December 1, 2023.

In addition, I have suffered a profound professional loss: my university, the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) has been destroyed. It is one out of 18 institutions of higher education in Gaza, which served about 87,000 students before Israel reduced them to ruins.

I joined IUG’s English Department in 1997 after I returned from the United States, where I had finished an MA in Linguistics at California State University, Fresno. Then I obtained a PhD in language development from Boston College and returned to IUG, where I continued to teach and do research, publishing many articles in local and international journals and participating in numerous conferences, symposia and workshops. I have also supervised and served as an examiner of several MA theses in applied linguistics.

IUG has 11 faculties, serving about 17,000 students, 63 percent of them women. Throughout the years, it has offered an excellent academic........

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