Ismail (Ismā‘īl) al-Ghamry (إسماعيل محمد أحمد الغمري) was a promising pedagogue who had just started a career in studying and teaching the Arabic language. He was a lecturer in the Curricula and Teaching Methods Department at the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG). In 2017, the Department inaugurated a doctoral program, becoming the only one in Gaza to grant PhDs in Pedagogy.
Born in 1992 in al-Maghazi, Dr. al-Ghamry received his BA in Arabic from al-Aqsa University in 2013, followed five years later by an MA from the Faculty of Education at IUG. In 2021, he earned a PhD from the University of the Holy Qur’an and Islamic Sciences in Omdurman, Sudan.
His MA thesis sought to test whether flipped classrooms had a positive effect on high school students’ prosody skills. The research was motivated by the problem of classroom crowding, where teachers cannot cater to individual students, necessitating more active learning options as an alternative to passive rote transmission. A report on education from Gaza’s Al Mezan Center for Human Rights indicated that the number of students per classroom averaged 41.20 at UNRWA schools, 39.56 at governmental schools, and 21.65 at private schools.
Based on a sample of 60 11th graders at al-Shuhada’ school, a boys’ public school in al-Maghazi, the thesis found a significant effect on students’ rhetorical skills, compared to a control group, but an average effect on developing prosody skills.
Two days after turning 32 years old, Dr. al-Ghamry was killed by an Israeli airstrike on 3 January 2024. His sister mourned him in a poignant tribute on Instagram as a fount of affection for all that he treasured.
In the dedicatory pages of his Master’s thesis, Dr. al-Ghamry expressed his love for the Prophet Muhammad, for his family, and for Palestine. “To a homeland for whom we have journeyed all the phases of life, as refugees, as the displaced, as prisoners, as a people under siege. In spite of everything, we broke our chains and penned what we desired, and soared higher and higher.”
