Juan Cole
Informed Comment / November 6, 2024
Ann Arbor – The Palestinian Ministry of Education released a report this week detailing that 11,923 students in Gaza have been killed by Israel’s total war in the past year.
In addition, 19,199 have been wounded, many with life-altering injuries.
A physician working in Gaza last summer reported to HRW, “We are talking about a huge number of traumatic amputations, especially in children, leaving children with permanent disabilities. Also, many children who were wounded by shrapnel all over their faces and bodies, and I have seen children lose their eyesight due to injuries.”
Leila al-Kafarna, a mother of three with an injured husband continually expelled from place to place in Gaza, told HRW: “I carried my husband on my back, and we kept walking on foot through the sand and gunfire over our heads and planes dropping leaflets. Our children screamed along the way. It felt like the whole world ran and screamed with fear.”
Al-Kafarna continued,
”We finally felt a bit relieved and on October 20, Malek, my 13-year-old son, and I went to the market…. We went there for four consecutive days, waiting in line to get our [food] coupon, and it was on our fourth day that the attack happened.
We were there for an hour-and-a-half. Suddenly, I felt something was off. I took Malek’s hand and told him we needed to leave, and that was when I heard something breaking from the walls. I looked up as the missile [munition] was hitting the supermarket, and I lost consciousness…. We were thrown away by the impact and surrounded by rubble. There were people and bodies around and on top of us. Body parts were everywhere.
I woke up with a fire near my face, like a meter away, and I was still holding my son’s arm, so I started running, thinking I’m running with my son…. I was screaming at him to run fast before they bomb again, and then I felt like my son was light, as if there was no weight on the arm. So, I looked and didn’t see my son anywhere near me, and that was when I discovered that I was holding only his arm.
I put the arm down and ran back, and I saw my son running and screaming “Allah, Allah,” and he started telling me to forgive him for any day he treated me badly, as if he was saying goodbye. Malek then fainted.”
One of the nearly 20,000 wounded school children, Malek lost his arm.
Although my headline says that the dead students did not go back to school this fall, actually none of the Gaza Strip’s 625,000 students could go back to school this year. That includes 45,000 first-graders.
Because Israel damaged or destroyed most of the schools and all the universities. All of them. A few months ago, a panel of UN experts said, “With more than 80% of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed, it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide.’”
The Palestinian Ministry of Education said that the Israeli Air Force conducted air strikes against 341 Gazan schools, universities, and university annex buildings, and against 65 schools of the UN Relief and Works Agency. Of these, 138 were badly damaged and 77 were completely destroyed.
Although the Israeli authorities represent these school buildings as secret headquarters of the Qassam Brigades militants, a moment’s reflection would be sufficient to conclude that this is a damned lie. Eighty percent of the schools in Gaza were Qassam Brigades HQs? That’s ridiculous. They were grade schools. Students were learning the multiplication tables and English grammar. European and American aid workers familiar with these institutions flatly deny the sinister Israeli cover story. It is the same with hospitals, where the Washington Post and the Associated Press did their own investigations and found that there is no evidence whatsoever to back Israeli claims that Hamas was using them for military purposes. The way you can tell that Netanyahu, his cronies and spokesmen are lying is that their lips are moving.
Al-Jazeera quotes a Palestinian mother, Lina, who said, “I miss being a mother with children in school. Now, I am in a tent, struggling to find water and figuring out how to cook on the fire. This is a monotonous, terrifying routine with the ongoing war, bombings and displacement from one place to another.”
During the past year the Israeli military has also killed 561 Palestinian school teachers, and has wounded 3,729, most of them in Gaza.
The few remaining structures are now used to house refugees, so the students are living in their partially destroyed schools with their relatives instead of studying with them. The Israeli Air Force occasionally bombs these schools-cum-shelters, killing more civilians. The presence of a single militant from the Qassam Brigades can justify rubbing out 20 innocent civilians in his vicinity according to the Israeli rules of engagement, the most horrendous among the OECD states. NATO would never permit this behaviour and has cut off military cooperation with Israel over its unconcern with minimizing civilian deaths.
UNICEF explains, ‘To respond to this situation, UNICEF and its partners have established 39 Temporary Learning Spaces in the Gaza Strip serving over 12,400 students. In addition, recreational activities, emergency learning kits, and Mental Health and Psycho-Social Support (MHPSS) are being offered to children, youth, caregivers, and teachers in shelters.”
UNICEF Middle East and North Africa Regional Director Adele Khodr said, “We must find ways to restart learning and rebuild schools to uphold the right to education of the next generations in the State of Palestine. Children need stability to cope with the trauma they have experienced, and the opportunity to develop and reach their full potential.” Children are not able to interact with one another and have no structured learning, threatening long-term cognitive development, which is worsened by water shortages and malnutrition.
UNICEF’s efforts are hampered by an 88% budget shortfall. While the US sent $20 billion in weaponry to Israel for the ongoing butchery, it gave UNICEF $1.5 bn last year for its work with children all around the world. UNICEF needed on the order of $3 billion just for Gaza this year. You can donate here. It is tax deductible.
Palestinians are the most literate of the Arabs because the United Nations has educated Palestinian refugee children for decades. Israel’s attempt to destroy the UN Relief and Works Agency and the constant restrictions it puts on agencies like UNICEF, along with its scholasticide in Gaza, are attempts to turn the Palestinians into illiterate dummies who are easily controlled and deprived of all their rights, to erase their very identity as a people.
Scholasticide is genocide.
It doesn’t matter to people in Gaza who wins the US presidential election. Trump tells Netanyahu to “finish the job.” The “job” is creating more amputees like 13-year-old Malek.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of, among others, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
