The Islamic University in Gaza City was hit twice on Sunday, 25 October, within a few hours, Al Jazeera reported. The first attack came from a drone. Its shrapnel wounded seven female students, one of them seriously enough to be taken to a nearby field hospital. Then came an air strike, and it killed three of the campus security guards.

What the guards were guarding

Before Sunday there was not much left to protect. Most of the university’s buildings had already been destroyed. Hani Mahmoud, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Gaza, put it plainly: “Only a couple of these buildings are partially standing.” Still, there were students there, and there were men paid to stand watch over the ruins. One may reflect that a guard at a destroyed university is guarding something other than walls: the idea that a place of learning is still a place, still owned by someone, still waiting for its classes to come back.

Mahmoud and his crew had just finished filming on the campus. They had greeted the three guards. Moments later the guards were dead. “The aftermath was massive,” Mahmoud said in his report from the scene. He described “the hissing sound of flying shrapnel everywhere”, so much of it that the team feared it would hit them too.

The three men were buried from Al-Shifa Hospital, which has become, over three years of war, the city’s place for the dead as well as the wounded.

The rest of the map

The university was one point on Sunday’s map. In al-Mawasi, in Khan Younis, Israeli shelling killed two people and wounded several others, a child among them, according to Nasser Medical Complex. East of Deir el-Balah, in central Gaza, a drone strike killed one person. On al-Rashid Street, near Hamad Hospital in the north, one person was killed and several wounded, the Wafa news agency reported. Later in the day, in the Sheikh Nasser neighbourhood east of Khan Younis, another man was killed and several more were hurt.

Al Jazeera counted at least eight dead. Other outlets put the figure at seven. In Gaza even the count is never settled, because the day is never quite over when the count is taken. Al Jazeera’s report carried no explanation from the Israeli military for why the campus was struck.

The arithmetic of a ceasefire

All of this happened under a ceasefire. It began in October 2025. Since then, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, at least 1,551 people have been killed and 5,573 injured. When the truce marked its first anniversary earlier this month, the figure for the dead stood at 1,511. That is forty more names in barely more than a week, in a time officially called peace.

Counted from October 2023, the ministry’s toll is 74,544 dead and at least 175,692 wounded.

Almost two-thirds of the Strip is now under Israeli military control or subject to its restrictions. When the hostages came home under the truce, Israel held about 60 percent of Gaza. The line has not moved back. Inside the shrinking remainder, Palestinians face a deepening food crisis, with crossings closed and international aid funding cut.

A ceasefire has a name. It has signatories. It has mediators and guarantors. On Sunday the Popular Resistance Committees condemned the strikes on the university and called on exactly those mediators and international guarantors to step in and stop further violations. Such appeals go out after nearly every deadly day. Who receives them, and what they do with them, is a question the guards’ families will not hear answered at Al-Shifa.

A country without lecture halls

UNESCO says close to 95 percent of Gaza’s higher-education campuses have been destroyed or damaged since October 2023. The figure describes a whole generation that cannot sit an exam in a room with a roof. Universities are how a people tells itself it has a future: doctors, engineers and teachers are trained there, and a society’s memory is kept there. When nineteen of every twenty campuses are broken, what is lost is the ordinary, unglamorous route by which young people become adults with a profession.

The seven women hit by shrapnel on Sunday were on that route. They had come to a campus where only a couple of buildings still partly stand, because that was the campus there was. Mahmoud said the strike was a reminder that safety remains “painfully out of reach”, even in the places where students are supposed to learn.

One of the seven is still in a field hospital. The three men who watched over the ruins, and who greeted a camera crew minutes before they died, are already buried.