DUBLIN?AMSTERDAM, 15 Sept. - (ANA) - More universities and educational institutions are announcing the severing of all ties with Israeli academia, citing the ongoing war on Gaza and accusations that it is complicit in the government’s actions against Palestinians.

 

Some of the latest institutions to announce they are cutting ties with Israeli academia include Trinity College Dublin and the University of Amsterdam, which ended a student exchange programme with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

 

Last year, Brazil’s Federal University of Ceara also announced that it had cancelled an innovation summit with an Israeli university, while other academic bodies in Norway, Spain, and Belgium stated that they too would be severing ties with Israeli academia.

 

The European Association of Social Anthropologists further added that it will no longer be collaborating with Israeli academic bodies, calling on its members to take similar action.

 

The growing move to cut ties with Israeli educational institutions comes as over 90 percent of school buildings have been damaged or destroyed by Israel in Gaza, according to Save the Children.

 

Israel has also killed around 19,000 children in the war on Gaza, the enclave’s government media office said last month, while the total toll from the war stands at over 64,000.

 

Stephanie Adam, from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, told reporters that the decision comes due to Israeli academic bodies being "complicit" with what several international rights groups have determined to be a genocide in Gaza.

 

He said that there is a "moral and legal obligation for universities to end ties with complicit Israel universities," adding that many Israeli academic institutions were complicit in "Israel’s decades-long regime of military occupation, settler colonial apartheid and now genocide".

 

Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British Palestinian surgeon who travelled to Gaza amid the war to assist overwhelmed medical teams but has since been banned from returning by Israel, said that the UK is blocking academics and students in the UK from carrying out academic boycotts of Tel Aviv.

 

He said the move has prompted many researchers to take unofficial action, adding that "the moral outrage about what the Israelis are doing is leading more and more academics to take personal decisions, not to have joint projects with Israelis".

 

"The threat of academic boycott is sufficient to push the Israeli government into ending this genocide," Abu-Sittah said.

 

Despite international outrage against Israel’s actions in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, some institutions in the UK, Germany and France have refused to join calls to cut ties to Israeli academia.

 

One such example is Universities UK, which issued a statement saying it does not support an academic boycott.

 

A Universities UK spokesperson told reporters that the institution has a "longstanding public position of being committed to the free exchange of ideas, regardless of nationality or location. As such, we do not endorse blanket academic boycotts, as this would represent an infringement of academic freedom".

 

The Royal Society also said it does not support academic boycotts.

 

According to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, around 660,000 children in Gaza have been deprived of education for the third consecutive year due to Israel’s war on the enclave.

 

The organisation said the bombardment and destruction of infrastructure in the enclave have violated students’ right to education and breached Israel’s obligations as a Member State of the UN.   - (ANA) - 

 

AB/ANA/15 September 2025 - - -