MESA Academic Freedom Award — The Emergency Committee of Universities in Gaza and the Isnad program of the Welfare Association (Taawon)

MESA Academic Freedom Award

The Emergency Committee of Universities in Gaza and the Isnad program of the Welfare Association (Taawon)

2025 Recipient

The Emergency Committee of Universities in Gaza

• On the 20th of May, 2024, over 150 Palestinian academics and staff from universities across Gaza issued a statement affirming their existence and collective determination to resume teaching and study in Gaza at their own institutions, and to coordinate recovery and maintain academic continuity despite the destruction of the higher education sector by Israeli military forces.
• Subsequently, the nonprofit universities operating in the occupied territory—Al-Azhar University, the Islamic University of Gaza, and Al-Aqsa University, which together serve nearly 80% of post-secondary students in Gaza—established the Emergency Committee of Universities in Gaza.
• The Emergency Committee plays a vital coordinating and advocacy role by supporting the efforts and helping to articulate the prioritized needs of nonprofit universities in Gaza to sustain their operations under such difficult conditions. Tens of thousands of students have been enrolled in remote courses. While the Committee does not itself provide this instruction, it is deeply engaged in ensuring the broader ecosystem—technological, financial, and institutional—remains functional and visible to the outside world.
• The Committee includes representatives, at the Dean level, from the big three universities in Gaza, and its work in the West is currently supported and facilitated by Friends of Palestinian Universities.

The Isnad Programme

• The Isnad Programme was initiated by the Emergency Committee of Universities in Gaza, and launched by the Presidents of Al-Aqsa, Al-Azhar, and the Islamic Universities through Taawon (The Welfare Association) and with formal Palestinian Ministry of Education participation, to help Palestinian universities sustain their academic mission, support faculty and staff members, and preserve the core pillars of the educational process.
• The project aimed, in its first two years, to raise $16 million to secure scholarships that allow students, otherwise unable, to pay their tuition fees, thus enabling Gazan students to access remote learning opportunities.
• The funding has been channeled directly into these universities, and it has so far enabled them to pay part of their faculty and staff's salaries and to keep the educational process going without interruption.
• Through this support, approximately 4,600 students have so far been able to resume their learning, and around 1,300 students have graduated.
• This has constituted the largest coordinated response, under the leadership of Gaza's nonprofit universities, to the most severe case of scholasticide in modern history.