GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — More than half of the academics who work at Palestinian universities and hold a foreign passport have faced denials or delays in visa processing from Israel during the past two years, Sabri Saidam, the Palestinian minister of education, said in a July 12 press conference held at the Palestinian Ministry of Education in Ramallah. Saidam said that Israel is obstructing the process particularly for academics of Palestinian origin who hold foreign passports, preventing them from acquiring and renewing visas for travel to Palestine for the purpose of teaching at a university.

“[Israel's] unjust policies have made Palestinian and foreign academics less willing to accept educational and research positions at Palestine’s institutions of higher education,” Saidam added. “These unjust policies have also hurt our appeal to this group of academics, undermining the quality of education and research programs at our universities.”

There are several academics of Palestinian origin who hail from families that fled the 1948 Nakba. These professors have foreign passports, as they were born outside the Palestinian territories. The Israeli authorities, who manage all entry points to the West Bank, treat them as foreigners and require them to have visas to enter the Palestinian territories.

On July 14, the Ramallah-based Birzeit University, one of Palestine’s most prominent universities, revealed in a statement posted on its official website that Israel rejected visa renewal applications for seven foreign academics, which forced three of them to leave Palestinian lands while the others awaits their expulsion.