Jaser Abu Mousa

Focus Areas: Conflict Resolution, Conflict Analysis, Middle East Affairs, Project & Security Management

Jaser Abu Mousa is a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, and at the International Peace Institute in New York. His work focuses on Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding, Gaza's governance and reconstruction, infrastructure policy, and the political economy of the Palestinian territories.

He brings more than twenty years of field experience in Gaza and the wider Middle East and North Africa region to the classroom. For nine years he managed humanitarian and governance portfolios for the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs in Gaza, where his responsibilities spanned program design, negotiation with local and international counterparts, and the operational judgment that working in a contested environment requires. That vantage point — the distance between what is drafted in capitals and what proves implementable on the ground — anchors both his research and his teaching.

His analysis draws on primary Arabic-language sources and long-standing field networks, and appears in policy and general-interest outlets, including Foreign Affairs, alongside institutional publications for MEI and IPI and his own regular writing for a broader public readership. He is a frequent commentator for international broadcast and print media and participates regularly in Track 1.5 and Track 2 convenings on the conflict, including at SIPA.

He completed a Peace Fellowship at Yale University's Jackson School of Global Affairs in 2025 and works in Arabic, Hebrew, English, and German. He is originally from Khan Younis, Gaza, and lives in the Boston area.

At SIPA he advises Capstone teams working on peace processes, post-conflict governance, and reconstruction policy.

Education 

• Peace Fellow, Yale University
• M.S. Project Management, Islamic University of Gaza
• B.S. Civil Engineering, Islamic University of Gaza