From Gaza, to the rooms where Gaza is decided.

Mohammed Mourtaja is a Palestinian voice from Gaza. He is a development policy specialist and writer, and his work is on post-conflict reconstruction, governance, and the international development policy that shapes both.

He went through the public school system in Gaza until he was eighteen. From there he won a full scholarship to Washington and Lee University in the United States, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in Economics and minors in Data Science and Middle Eastern Studies. He then went to the University of Cambridge on a full tuition scholarship for the MPhil in Development Studies.

He graduated with Distinction. His dissertation on Gaza's reconstruction, The Reconstruction of Failure, was also awarded a Distinction and received one of the highest grades in his cohort.

That dissertation sets Gaza's 2014 post-war reconstruction mechanism against the frameworks proposed after 2025, and asks why plans meant to rebuild Gaza keep failing the people they are supposed to serve.

He works as a Research and Policy Consultant on Gaza for an international human rights and conflict resolution organisation, where he has authored policy research, delivered more than ten briefings to senior policy audiences, and presented findings directly to Palestinian ministers, European diplomats, and UN agency staff. He has co-convened confidential Arab, Palestinian, and European policy dialogues, and has designed monitoring and evaluation frameworks that hold donor commitments to their stated targets.

He founded GazaIndex, an open access data platform preserving the humanitarian record of Gaza, and leads it at the Gaza Genocide Center, where the platform now has its institutional home.

He is an Azm Global Leaders Fellow, selected from roughly 2,500 applicants for a two year programme building a new generation of leaders from across the Muslim world. The fellowship runs from 2026 to 2028 and takes its cohort through training in negotiation, leadership, and psychology. The opening summit was held in Malaysia.

He has published in Middle East Eye, The New Arab, and Mondoweiss, and writes weekly on Substack. He speaks at universities, policy roundtables, and conferences on Gaza, reconstruction, and development policy. Native Arabic speaker, bilingual in English.