Image Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky
The introduction below comes from a former 500 Women Scientists leadership team member, a scholar based in the Middle East.
Honoring Lost Scholars — and Protecting Knowledge in an Era of Assaults on Education and Research
The continuing aggression and violence by Israel across the Middle East has not only taken countless human lives, it has also imperiled the foundations of education, research, and scientific progress. In Gaza, the devastating loss of hundreds of academics and students is compounded by the destruction of universities and research centers, erasing decades of intellectual growth and community investment. This pattern of destruction extends beyond Gaza, with ongoing violence in the West Bank and across the region.
This crisis is not limited to Palestine. Recent airstrikes by Israel and the United States have severely damaged prominent universities such as Sharif University the MIT of Iran and the Pasteur Institute of Iran, a century-old public health and scientific research institution vital for biomedical research, vaccine production, and disease prevention across the region. These attacks, along with the killing of Iranian scientists and their families and similar threats to institutions in Lebanon and elsewhere, do more than destroy infrastructure—they undermine knowledge systems and weaken the foundations for future innovation and public welfare.
This destruction is not only institutional—it is deeply personal. My colleague, Professor Manal, a professor of nutrition at An-Najah University in Nablus in the West Bank, was detained on November 3, 2025, and remains imprisoned in Damon prison without trial or formal charge. A visit by a friend in March 2026 revealed the conditions she is enduring: she is held in a single room with nine other women, with very little food, poor hygiene, and visible signs of insect bites. Three prisoners share beds in shifts, taking turns to sleep while others remain awake and hungry.
Professor Manal, born March 13, 1977, was taken from her home at 2 a.m. She has expressed concern not for herself, but for her daughters, her mother, and her husband. She also asked about a manuscript she had been working on—writing about nutrition under conditions of imprisonment—demonstrating a commitment to knowledge even in captivity. Her case is not isolated. There are over 10,000 Palestinians detained without charge, including approximately 350 children, some as young as eight years old.
Recent legislative developments enabling the use of the death penalty further heighten the danger faced by detainees, including scholars like Professor Manal. The possibility that individuals could face execution without due process represents a grave and urgent threat. It is imperative that the international community act to halt this trajectory and hold accountable those who support or enable policies that place detainees at such extreme risk.
The imprisonment of scholars without due process, alongside the broader targeting of academic life, represents a profound moral and legal crisis. These patterns—destruction of institutions, killing of academics, and detention of scholars—collectively point to a systematic erosion of knowledge systems.
In this context, documenting and commemorating the intellectuals lost to conflict becomes urgent—not only to honor their contributions but to assert the value of scholarship and education in times of crisis. The Remembering Gaza’s Scholars Archive is one such effort: a living record of lives and work that must be preserved, and a call for academic communities worldwide to resist the erasure of intellectual life.
As scientists and educators, we have a duty to raise awareness of these attacks, to speak out against the systematic destruction of knowledge, and to demand accountability from those responsible. The global academic community can take meaningful action through boycotts, sanctions, and public advocacy, ensuring that the perpetrators of these assaults face consequences and that the memory of fallen scholars is honored.
Recently, a new archive has been launched commemorating Palestinian scholars killed during Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza between 2023 and 2025. The initiative documents the lives, work, and contributions of university professors, researchers, and educators whose deaths represent a devastating loss to Palestinian higher education and the global intellectual community.
Among those remembered are distinguished figures such as physicist and university president Sufyan Tayeh, who held a UNESCO Chair in Physical, Astrophysical, and Space Sciences; Khaled al-Ramlawi, a young engineering professor who returned to Gaza after completing his doctorate abroad to contribute to water management research; and Rola Abdul Jawad, a 29-year-old computer engineering lecturer and graphic designer at the start of a promising academic career.
The archive is part of a broader effort to document what scholars and human rights advocates have described as “scholasticide”—the systematic destruction of Gaza’s higher education sector. Since October 2023, all of Gaza’s universities have been severely damaged or destroyed. More than 57 university buildings have been flattened and 19 higher-education institutions rendered inoperable. At least 200 academic staff members and more than 1,200 university students have been killed, while approximately 87,000 students have experienced near-total disruption to their studies.
Contributors to the archive stress that these scholars were not only educators but builders of Gaza’s intellectual life. Many had studied abroad and chose to return despite years of blockade and resource scarcity, dedicating themselves to teaching, research, and institution-building under extremely difficult conditions.
The project also calls attention to the silence of many major academic institutions and professional associations worldwide. While organizations representing journalists, writers, and medical professionals have publicly condemned the killing of their colleagues, the archive’s organizers urge universities, scholarly societies, and academic journals to speak out in defense of intellectual life and human solidarity.
The archive draws on documentation from Palestinian and international sources, including academic institutions, human rights organizations, and colleagues of the deceased. Organizers describe it as an evolving project and invite scholars and institutions worldwide to contribute additional information and help preserve the memory of Gaza’s slain academics.
“This archive is both a memorial and a call for accountability,” the organizers said. “By recording the lives and achievements of these scholars, we seek to honor their contributions and ensure that the destruction of Gaza’s intellectual community is neither forgotten nor ignored.”
take action
Attend the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Federal Science Action Hour on April 9th, 2-3 PM Eastern to prepare for this season of advocacy. Sign up here
Join May Day (May 1): No work, no school, no shopping!
Bookmark This
The Trump administration is dismantling the US Forest Service. The folks behind Alt National Park Service have organized SaveUSFS.org to help us fight back.
weekly wins
Girl, bye - Trump fired Pam Bondi as attorney general and this is the 2nd high level Trump administration official to be fired. We got no love for Pam Bondi and less than zero love for Kristi Noem, but can’t help but notice that women are getting fired, while even more incompetent men are keeping their jobs.
In 2025, Puerto Rico got 20% of their energy from rooftop solar!
weekly wonder
The Artemis II crew of four astronauts launched on April 1 and will be in space for 10 days, flying around the moon and returning to Earth. This is the 1st crewed mission to the moon in 50 years and a test of human deep space capabilities that can inform how a crew may be able to travel to Mars in the future. Christina Koch and Victor Glover are the first woman and first African American, respectively, to leave Earth’s orbit.
Let this sink in. There is a woman and a black man in a spaceship, orbiting around the moon, with millions watching from Earth, geeking out about science and space. Just imagine what we could do if we can galvanize that kind of ingenuity and collective action to solve our challenges here on Earth.
Y’all - a couple of big papers (one and two) came out this week, with evidence that bacteria can produce proteins that can be used to fight viruses. Next up, learning from bacteria to develop a new arsenal of tools to fight virus-borne diseases.
check it out
Stellar modeling from Stanford and visualization from ProPublica showing what will happen if people do not vaccinate their children against polio, measles, rubela, or diphtheria.
The Vera C Rubin Observatory is revolutionizing astronomy, imaging every point in the skies over the Southern Hemisphere 800 times over a 10-year period
We’ve been beating the AI criticism drum for years so here is another reason to proceed with caution or #resist - a new study shows that AI agents misrepresent news content 45% of the time
shame on you
Shame on you Rutherford County Library Board in Tennessee for firing system director Luanne James, who refused to remove more than 100 books from the library shelves, often books that center LGBTQ+ and racial themes.
Longer reads
The Militia and the Mole is a long piece ProPublica published in January 2025 about the new rise of the militia movement. Its fascinating, terrifying and timely.
This piece from Minas Karamanis about LLMs is thoughtful and thought-provoking. “What's great about science is its people. The slow, stubborn, sometimes painful process by which a confused student becomes an independent thinker. If we use these tools to bypass that process in favor of faster output, we don't just risk taking away what's great about science. We take away the only part of it that wasn't replaceable in the first place…..The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can't produce understanding. Who know what buttons to press but not why those buttons exist. Who can get a paper through peer review but can't sit in a room with a colleague and explain, from the ground up, why the third term in their expansion has the sign that it does.”
Book nook
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins by Anna Lowenhaulp Tsing
Speaking of space, pre-order Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s new book The Edge of Space-Time.
watch this
Tom Morello’s remarks kicking off their performance in Minneapolis in January 2026.
…by the way
Nothing too ambivalent about this kind of sexism - men who hate women want a tradwife
🙃 There have been 50 seasons of the show Survivor. And if that’s not making your brain melt, apparently talking about unequal gender representation is ruining season 50.