In a recent letter to the editor of the Bulletin of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, Israel was accused of deliberately bombing and destroying Palestinian universities in Gaza, as well as killing faculty, students and administrator. The letter makes no mention of the killing, raping and kidnapping of Israeli men, women and children on October 7. It does not mention the thousands of rockets fired indiscriminately toward Israeli civilian centers by Hamas. Nor does it mention that Hamas weaponized hospitals, schools and civilian residences throughout Gaza, or that hundreds of Israeli soldiers have been killed and thousands injured in a war that includes lethal ambushes and booby-traps set by an enemy that intentionally embeds itself in a civilian population.
The writer, a professor at a Canadian university, asks Canadian institutions of higher learning to cut ties with Israeli institutions. He also mentions a call by 15 Palestinian universities for the international community to boycott Israeli academic institutions.
How many Palestinian universities are there in Gaza? According to Le Monde, there are 12 universities in Gaza. The Islamic University of Gaza, for example, has 15,000 to 20,000 students and the pictures on the internet portray a handsome cluster of buildings that would be a source of pride to the residents of any country in the world. (I do not know what it looks today after five months of war.) A pharmacy student at the University of Palestine in Gaza (20,000 students) is quoted as saying “Before October 7, Gaza was a pretty pleasant place,” and “My university, not far from the sea, was very nice.”
An Israeli journalist, Roi Yanovsky, who spent three months fighting in Gaza, reported that living conditions in Gaza City are far more luxurious than he was led to believe from reading and hearing years of press reports describing crowded and backward conditions—all blamed on the siege conditions imposed by Israel. He notes, “Gaza is a modern, beautiful and developed city—with large and well-equipped houses, wide boulevards, public spaces, a promenade by the sea, and parks. It looks much better than any Arab city from the Jordan River to the sea; it resembles Tel Aviv far more than Kafr Qassem or Umm Al Fahm.” Hardly “an open air prison.”
Gaza also has 36 hospitals, yes 36, for a population of a little over two million. Al Shifta, the largest and the focus of accusations that Hamas used hospitals for military purposes, can accommodate 800 beds.
Judging from some of the hospital names, for example, the Indonesian Hospital, some were built with the help of generous donations from various parts of the world. In fact, financial support for Gaza, including significant funding from the EU, the United States and other western countries to support UNWRA, as well as generous donations from Arab states, particularly Gulf States such as Qatar, has amounted to billions of dollars over the years. While the residents of Gaza must fend for themselves during the war, the leaders of Hamas are riding it out in the lap of luxury in Qatar.
However, the most impressive example of innovation, engineering prowess and technological ability in Gaza must surely be in the construction of an extensive and sophisticated system of tunnels. This interconnected system, hundreds of kilometers long, designed to protect Hamas militants from Israeli attack, also provided a safe environment for the production of an array of weapons, particularly rockets. (Of course, since October 7 the tunnels have been used to hide Israeli hostages.)
The best description of the tunnels that I found is a detailed Reuters article from December 31, 2023 that includes pictures, maps and drawings showing how the entrances were hidden in the high rise buildings of Gaza, as well as in the sand dunes outside the urban centers. Many of the concealed entrances are in private homes, also under hospitals such as Al Shifta.
Bassem Eid is a Palestinian human rights activist who has written extensively about human rights abuses, including torture, by both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. On October 9, 2023, two days after the Hamas attack, Newsweekpublished an opinion piece by Eid, titled “Gaza Could have Been Singapore. Hamas turned it into ISIS.” How right he was.
Israel is conducting a war against Hamas, a war initiated by Hamas, a war in which Hamas is intentionally hiding among civilians. Hamas, not Israel, is responsible for the tragedy that has unfolded in Gaza.
Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, who taught at the University of Waterloo.
Gaza Could Have Been Another Singapore
Jacob Sivak
In a recent letter to the editor of the Bulletin of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, Israel was accused of deliberately bombing and destroying Palestinian universities in Gaza, as well as killing faculty, students and administrator. The letter makes no mention of the killing, raping and kidnapping of Israeli men, women and children on October 7. It does not mention the thousands of rockets fired indiscriminately toward Israeli civilian centers by Hamas. Nor does it mention that Hamas weaponized hospitals, schools and civilian residences throughout Gaza, or that hundreds of Israeli soldiers have been killed and thousands injured in a war that includes lethal ambushes and booby-traps set by an enemy that intentionally embeds itself in a civilian population.
The writer, a professor at a Canadian university, asks Canadian institutions of higher learning to cut ties with Israeli institutions. He also mentions a call by 15 Palestinian universities for the international community to boycott Israeli academic institutions.
How many Palestinian universities are there in Gaza? According to Le Monde, there are 12 universities in Gaza. The Islamic University of Gaza, for example, has 15,000 to 20,000 students and the pictures on the internet portray a handsome cluster of buildings that would be a source of pride to the residents of any country in the world. (I do not know what it looks today after five months of war.) A pharmacy student at the University of Palestine in Gaza (20,000 students) is quoted as saying “Before October 7, Gaza was a pretty pleasant place,” and “My university, not far from the sea, was very nice.”
An Israeli journalist, Roi Yanovsky, who spent three months fighting in Gaza, reported that living conditions in Gaza City are far more luxurious than he was led to believe from reading and hearing years of press reports describing crowded and backward conditions—all blamed on the siege conditions imposed by Israel. He notes, “Gaza is a modern, beautiful and developed city—with large and well-equipped houses, wide boulevards, public spaces, a promenade by the sea, and parks. It looks much better than any Arab city from the Jordan River to the sea; it resembles Tel Aviv far more than Kafr Qassem or Umm Al Fahm.” Hardly “an open air prison.”
Gaza also has 36 hospitals, yes 36, for a population of a little over two million. Al Shifta, the largest and the focus of accusations that Hamas used hospitals for military purposes, can accommodate 800 beds.
Judging from some of the hospital names, for example, the Indonesian Hospital, some were built with the help of generous donations from various parts of the world. In fact, financial support for Gaza, including significant funding from the EU, the United States and other western countries to support UNWRA, as well as generous donations from Arab states, particularly Gulf States such as Qatar, has amounted to billions of dollars over the years. While the residents of Gaza must fend for themselves during the war, the leaders of Hamas are riding it out in the lap of luxury in Qatar.
However, the most impressive example of innovation, engineering prowess and technological ability in Gaza must surely be in the construction of an extensive and sophisticated system of tunnels. This interconnected system, hundreds of kilometers long, designed to protect Hamas militants from Israeli attack, also provided a safe environment for the production of an array of weapons, particularly rockets. (Of course, since October 7 the tunnels have been used to hide Israeli hostages.)
The best description of the tunnels that I found is a detailed Reuters article from December 31, 2023 that includes pictures, maps and drawings showing how the entrances were hidden in the high rise buildings of Gaza, as well as in the sand dunes outside the urban centers. Many of the concealed entrances are in private homes, also under hospitals such as Al Shifta.
Bassem Eid is a Palestinian human rights activist who has written extensively about human rights abuses, including torture, by both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. On October 9, 2023, two days after the Hamas attack, Newsweekpublished an opinion piece by Eid, titled “Gaza Could have Been Singapore. Hamas turned it into ISIS.” How right he was.
Israel is conducting a war against Hamas, a war initiated by Hamas, a war in which Hamas is intentionally hiding among civilians. Hamas, not Israel, is responsible for the tragedy that has unfolded in Gaza.
Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, who taught at the University of Waterloo.
Did you enjoy this article?
You'll love our roundtable.
Editor's Picks
Israel and the Internet Wars – A Professional Social Media Review
The Invisible Student: A Tale of Homelessness at UCLA and USC
What Ever Happened to the LA Times?
Who Are the Jews On Joe Biden’s Cabinet?
You’re Not a Bad Jewish Mom If Your Kid Wants Santa Claus to Come to Your House
No Labels: The Group Fighting for the Political Center
Latest Articles
Disarm, Verify, Withdraw. The Only Path Forward for Gaza
Plea — A poem for Parsha Shoftim
Remembering Elly Katz: She Came to Show Us How
Evolution is the Goal of Textual Study
A Bisl Torah — If They’re Not Ready
A Moment in Time: What We Let Through
Print Issue: Education for Jewish Endurance | August 14, 2026
The five things we get wrong in Jewish education and what we can all do to improve it.
Rabbis of LA | A Tale of Two Cities … and Two Rabbis
Second of two parts
Elie Wiesel Film Premiere, JNF-USA Golf Tournament, AJC Los Angeles Names Director
Notable people and events in the Jewish LA community.
Dafina, the Shabbat Dish That Brings Us Home
For generations, Moroccan Jewish mothers and grandmothers prepared their dafina on Friday, knowing that it would sustain their families on Saturday.
Table for Five: Shoftim
Pursuing Justice
Education for Jewish Endurance
The five things we get wrong in Jewish education and what we can all do to improve it.
Let Go & Let G-d ft. Elizabeth Sutton
Taking the Gloves Off: New Initiative Says ‘Enough’ to the Boycott of Israeli Academics
We may be able to tolerate an irrational mob that goes after anything associated with Israel, but academics whose lives revolve around the search for truth and knowledge?
A Book That Writes Itself: Dalia Rotter Youngerwood’s Jewish Journal
“Shavua” is an interactive journal woven with Jewish wisdom, inviting readers to pause, reflect and add their own thoughts to an ongoing Jewish conversation.
A Look Back at Israel’s Concert History — and When the Big Acts Might Return
For decades, the world’s biggest musical acts brought their concert tours through Israel: Michael Jackson, Madonna, U2, Paul McCartney, Pearl Jam, Alanis Morissette, Rihanna and Rage Against the Machine.
Why Diaspora Jews Should Care About a New Haredi Political Voice
The Haredi Public Party was created because the Haredi public deserves more than excuses, Israeli society deserves more than permanent confrontation, and the Jewish people deserve an Israel capable of reconciling Torah, responsibility and national unity.
My Teacher Union Ejected Me from a Meeting for Being a Zionist
For more than 30 minutes, approximately 160 delegates took turns denouncing me by name for being a Zionist, and calling Zionism racism.
Beth Jacob Holds Farewell Shabbat for Longtime Rabbi Kalman Topp
Topp is departing Beth Jacob, where he has served as senior rabbi since 2009. He and his wife, Rebbetzin Jordana, are making aliyah.
The Torah on One Foot: Disability Inclusion as the Core of Jewish Life
He didn’t ask the audience to overlook his disability; he showed us how it could become a source of power, beauty and artistic innovation.
One Rabbi’s Crusade Against Qatar’s Global Influence
Rabbi Pini Dunner sees himself as sounding an alarm about what he describes as Qatar’s growing influence and ties to Hamas.
Rosner’s Domain | No Suspension of Suspicion
These countries plotted – or at least one of them plotted – to advance peace agreements with Israel simply to lull it to sleep ahead of a war at a more convenient time. Or so the “sources” say.
The Power of a Quilt
I think of how something as simple as a blanket can carry a person’s spirit, their story, their love, their hope.
Jewish Democrats Take Note: It’s OK to Be Self-Protective
Because antizionists like El-Sayed interweave their antizionism with anti-Americanism and antisemitism, every self-respecting American Jew should work even harder to oppose him.
Defend America — Save the Democratic Party, Defeat Abdul El-Sayed
It is crucial that El-Sayed be defeated so the Democratic Party will understand that being taken over by such extremists is the road to electoral oblivion.
The Iranian Intellectual Who Admired Israel
The scholar’s earlier affinity for the Jewish state is worth revisiting and appreciating, reminding us in this moment of uncertainty that more positive possibilities could very well emerge between two nations, a friendship as existed decades ago, renewed.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.