The BRISMES Fund for Higher Education in Gaza

Founded in 1973, the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) is the largest national academic association in Europe focused on the study of the Middle East and North Africa. BRISMES is a registered charity in (RCN: 1161206). The Society is governed by a Council of trustees elected from the membership.

Since October 2023, Israel has damaged or destroyed buildings on every university campus in the Gaza Strip. Libraries, science labs, and historical archives have all been obliterated. Israel has killed hundreds of university students and more than 100 academics, including numerous internationally respected scholars, deans and presidents, thus serving a harsh blow not only to the physical infrastructure of higher education in the Gaza Strip, but also to its intellectual underpinnings. At a time when the Palestinian population in Gaza needs them most, it will take years to rebuild university programmes in social work, physiotherapy and medicine, but also in engineering, physics, chemistry, biology, literature, law and history.

On 20 May 2024, over 150 Palestinian academics and staff from Gaza universities issued a statement affirming their existence and collective determination to resume teaching and study in Gaza, at their own institutions, despite the destruction of the higher education sector by Israeli military forces. In order to resist the ongoing scholasticide, they called on international support to reopen the universities in Gaza at the earliest opportunity.

In response to this call, BRISMES has created The BRISMES Fund For Higher Education in Gaza. As members of BRISMES, we have a moral obligation to support our colleagues and their students by helping to stop the educide in Gaza .

We invite you to donate to and share the BRISMES Fund for Higher Education in Gaza. We have established a committee to oversee the allocation of the funds, in line with the declared priorities of the Emergency Committee of Universities in Gaza, which will be co-chaired by BRISMES’s incoming President Professor Nicola Pratt and Dr Malaka Shwaikh, St Andrews University. We will include three further BRISMES members, who are from Gaza and/or are experts on Palestine.

Decisions about where the funds are directed will be publicised on this page.

Please note that BRISMES will not deduct any administrative costs from donations and all money donated will go towards supporting the survival and rebuilding of the higher education system in Gaza.