The essays in this series were written during the summer of 2024, and may not fully address rapidly escalating violence in the region.

As the essays in this series go to press, a genocidal war in Gaza continues to escalate throughout Palestine and around the region. 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza face famine-like conditions, all critical infrastructure has been destroyed, and not a single university in Gaza is functional. The buildings of Gaza's several universities are 80 percent destroyed; hundreds of educators and thousands of students have been killed. Oxford scholar Karma Nablusi, referring to the context of the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2009, called the repeated and systematic destruction of Palestinian educational institutions over time, scholasticide. In the face of this ongoing catastrophe, this Hot Spots series contributes to continued efforts to amplify and produce multi-dimensional and layered scholarship on Palestine in regional perspective.

The second half of this series was published on November 5.