A war between Israel and Hamas has been going on for over a year. A fragile truce is in place as I write, but who knows how long it will last?  Gaza is now a desolated area, because in its ruthless campaign to destroy Hamas, Israel has killed many civilians, destroyed their homes, and reduced others to starvation. Disease is rampant, but hospitals have been bombed, impeding a medical response to the outbreak of disease. Here is an account by the renowned historian Adam Tooze of what has happened over the past year: "Before the onslaught, Gaza was a compact space with clusters of dense urban settlement. It is comparable in population and size not to Khartoum, Sudan's capital, but to neighboring Omdurman, Sudan's second metro area. Omdurman has a population of 2.3 million spread over 230 square miles. In Gaza 2.1 million people live in 139 square miles. Into the most densely populated parts of Gaza's urban areas, the Israeli military have unleashed extraordinary firepower. Already in December 2023 John Paul Rathbone, the Financial Times security correspondent, concluded that Israel was inflicting on Gaza one of the heaviest and most concentrated bombardments in military history. By April 2024 Euro-Med Civil Rights Monitor put the figure for munitions used at 70,000 tons of explosives. For sake of comparison that is ten times greater than the tonnage dropped in the notorious bombing raid on the German city of Dresden in February 1945. It is four and half times the explosive force of the atomic bomb that annihilated Hiroshima in August 1945. In November 2024 the Environmental Quality Authority of the Palestine Authority estimated that in barely more than a year, the Israeli bombardment of Gaza had delivered no less than 85,000 tonnes of explosives. The result in Gaza is destruction of an intensity rarely seen in the history of warfare. It is unimaginable in Sudan's civil war, which is fought with far less military equipment. Nowhere in Sudan has suffered anything like the concentrated destruction meted out to Gaza. What has enabled this concentration of firepower are not only Israel's own resources but unstinting US aid. Enthusiastically promoted by the Biden administration and supported by huge majorities in Congress, this has accounted for a very high share of the munitions dropped.

Across Gaza more than half of all buildings have been damaged. In Gaza city the share is over 80 percent. Unsurprisingly, the havoc extends to Gaza's 12 universities, all of which have been completely or partially destroyed. At the same time, the intensity of fire and the orders of the IDF have brutally displaced virtually the entire population, making it impossible for normal life to continue. If education and scholarship have continued – and they have – it is only due to the dauntless determination and bravery of Palestinian faculty and students. Not only is the damage to the education system clearly far more comprehensive than that suffered in Sudan, or anywhere else in the world, but the kind of communications networks that allow educational researchers to assess the scale of the damage in Sudan in relatively precise terms, no longer exist in Gaza. It is a scene of total ruination."