Bethlehem, occupied West Bank – An orchestra of drums and whistles fills a hall at Bethlehem University as groups of cheering final-year students finish presenting their graduation projects.

Families pour in throughout the day, flowers in hand, phones raised for photos. But beneath the celebration, a quiet dread is setting in.

Siwar Abu Kamal, 21, had a plan when she started university: get her degree, find a job, build a life. Now, in the final year of her business degree, that plan feels less certain with every passing week.

“The older you get, the more reality shocks you,” she told Al Jazeera.

For decades, education was one of the few paths Palestinians could still place their faith in, a route to stability, dignity and social mobility despite occupation and political instability. Now, many young graduates say that promise is collapsing.

Nearly 40 percent of young Palestinians in the occupied West Bank holding at least a diploma are unemployed, according to figures cited by the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS).

Overall, unemployment has more than doubled since October 2023, peaking at 35.2 percent in early 2024 and sitting at 27.5 percent by the end of 2025. As it started its genocidal war on Gaza, Israel also indefinitely froze work permits for 115,000 Palestinians from the West Bank who worked in the country. Only a few of those permits have since been renewed, compounding the unemployment crisis in the West Bank.

“We’re seeing people across the world getting jobs and living their best life while we’re stuck,” says Abu Kamal’s classmate Christy Abu Mahour, 21. “We don’t get the same options as everyone else.”

For these students, reaching graduation takes more than academic perseverance. On top of the usual pressures of exams, deadlines and coursework, military raids and road closures turn short commutes into long, unpredictable journeys.

Classes move online with each new political escalation. And many have had to work to fund their degrees as financial pressure at home mounted.

“Why did I study in the end?” asks Khaled Abu Aishah, a fourth-year media student. “Did I study not to get a job?”

It is a question Enass Elias, the university’s academic and career counsellor, hears more and more.

“These students are giving their studies their best, and are reaching the stage where they say, ‘What do I want with a degree?’ Psychologically, they are exhausted,” Elias said.

An economy that cannot absorb its graduates

Every year, Palestinian universities produce tens of thousands of graduates, but the economy has not been growing to meet them.

Salsabyl Salama, 25, graduated in 2023 with a degree in physiotherapy. After five years of studying and training, the only job she found in her field was a four-month placement through an UNRWA programme in one of Bethlehem’s refugee camps.

Now she works at a supermarket checkout.

“It’s not what I dreamed of,” Salama told Al Jazeera. “But it allows me to depend on myself.”

Elias, the university counsellor, tells Al Jazeera she sees this pattern constantly. When a hospital announces two vacancies, she says, 60 or 70 graduates compete for them. Even then, many employers demand prior experience, shutting new graduates out before they have even begun.

Meanwhile, work in the public sector, which was once seen as a stable path, has become increasingly unreliable.

“Students have become very distant from government work,” says Elias. Those who complete training placements in government hospitals or schools often come back discouraged by what they find.

That disillusionment is unfolding against a deeper crisis inside the public sector itself.

Since 2021, the Palestinian Authority has struggled to pay salaries as a result of Israel withholding large portions of Palestinian tax revenues collected on its behalf, a practice that intensified after October 2023.

By mid-2025, public sector workers had accumulated billions of dollars in unpaid wages, according to the World Bank.

Public sector jobs are now being avoided altogether. Salama said she would “rather stay home” than work in a government office where she would not be paid a full salary.

The slow exodus of Palestinian talent

Beyond unemployment, the crisis is driving a growing number of Palestinians to leave the country altogether, says Maher Canawati, former mayor of Bethlehem.

“We see doctors working in restaurants, we see architects struggling, we see nurses begging for work,” he told Al Jazeera. “We see all kinds of graduates who just want to live a normal life, to have a normal job and to have a decent future for themselves and their families.”

For years, many Palestinians turned to employment across the “Green Line”, the generally recognised boundary between Israel and the West Bank, as an alternative, with Israeli companies often offering Palestinians low-paid manual work. But even that route was distorting the economy long before October 2023.

“Even before the war, many workers in Israel were actually doctors, nurses, architects who chose construction because the money was better,” says Canawati.

MAS told Al Jazeera that decades of dependence on jobs in Israel left the Palestinian economy too weak to absorb graduates locally, and “effectively turned Palestinian workers into ‘political hostages’, tying their livelihoods to volatile Israeli security considerations rather than sustainable domestic growth”.

Now, Canawati says, many are leaving Palestine altogether. In the Bethlehem governorate alone, about 1,080 people holding at least a master’s degree left in the past three years.

“All of the brains are leaving,” he says. “Getting immigration papers and leaving Palestine without those who can actually build the economy, build the country.”

For those who stay, leaving their field entirely is sometimes the only option. For Salama, that has meant enrolling in a pastry chef course alongside her job at a grocery store, an attempt, she says, to rebuild some sense of direction.

“I was beginning to lose hope, but hope came back to me,” she says.

At Bethlehem University, Elias, who has spent six years working to bridge the gap between graduation and employment, says she sees the same resilience in the students who come through her office.

“I always try to tell them: this degree is your weapon and your passport,” she says. “You don’t know what will happen.”

Meanwhile, graduation celebrations continue late into the afternoon. Students in formal clothes move through the courtyard as families gather for photographs beneath the sun.

“There is happiness here,” says Abu Kamal over the sound of drums and cheering. “We hold on to hope because people deserve happiness.”