Recognising Palestine won't heal Gaza's lost generation

Over the past month, I should have been welcoming students to Al-Aqsa University in Gaza.

- AHMED KAMAL JUNINA

Instead, as the UK prepares to recognise the state of Palestine, I find myself teaching online from a crowded internet café, connecting whenever the internet allows - sometimes in brief moments of calm, accompanied only by the hum of a generator and the click of keyboards, and sometimes amid sudden chaos: evacuating on short notice after warnings, navigating intermittent blackouts, or teaching while drones buzz overhead and ambulance sirens wail in the distance.

The university campus has been destroyed; the library reduced to rubble, the classrooms flattened. News of loved ones killed or injured reaches me constantly; so far, 41 members of my extended family have been killed. Yet life and work press on, even as the Israeli ground invasion into Gaza City unfolds around us.

A few days ago, my world was shattered when my 17-year-old nephew, Mohammed, was shot in the neck by a quadcopter drone. The news arrived moments before a project meeting and on the eve of a keynote speech I was to deliver to the Education and Development Forum (UKFIET) in Oxford. My hands trembled and the room seemed to dissolve around me.

I spent that night in the hospital, watching another nephew, Tamer, himself a nurse, working frantically with the medical team to save his cousin's life. The sight was profoundly moving: two young men bound by family and by blood, one fighting to survive and the other fighting to keep him alive. It was a moment of unity amid devastation.

Hours later, I delivered the keynote virtually, keeping my voice steady, though my thoughts never left Mohammed. Now, as I write this, Mohammed remains in the ICU of a mobile hospital in Gaza City, fighting for his life, when he should be sitting in a classroom, learning, growing, and dreaming of the future. The weight of what could come presses on me with every passing hour.