Sharon Zhang
Truthout / August 2, 2024
Israel’s siege of Gaza “is destroying the present and the future of Palestinian children,” UNRWA said.
In just the last 10 months of its genocide, Israel has damaged or destroyed nearly 9 out of 10 schools in Gaza, the UN has reported.
According to assessments by the UN-backed Global Education Cluster, almost 85 percent of school buildings in Gaza have been directly hit or damaged, as the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) highlighted on Friday.
“Some of these schools will need full reconstruction. The war is destroying the present and the future of Palestinian children,” the agency wrote, calling for a ceasefire.
This is an astonishing proportion of school buildings in Gaza, and is emblematic of Israel’s campaign to destroy all sense of structure and community for Palestinian children — in addition to blowing off their limbs, orphaning them, and killing them through bombs, bullets, disease and starvation.
School has been suspended throughout the genocide, meaning that Gaza’s 1.1 million children haven’t gone to school in nearly a year, severely hampering their development amid a time of extreme trauma. The UNRWA announced this week that it is launching a “back to learning” program this week in Gaza that will raise awareness of unexploded ordnance, among other things; but children’s development has been so violently disrupted in the region that this will likely only be a band aid on the crisis.
Israel has bombed schools at a higher rate than other buildings in Gaza, suggesting that the Israeli military is deliberately destroying Gaza’s school system. A UN assessment released this week found that 63 percent of buildings in Gaza have been damaged — a staggering proportion in itself, but one much smaller than the damage done to schools.
In addition to flattening schools, Israeli forces have destroyed every single university in Gaza in what many academics have dubbed a scholasticide. It is a war crime to target civilian infrastructure in war, but, as experts point out, Israel has a long history of flagrantly violating international law with impunity — including by targeting educational institutions, which play a crucial role in preserving Palestinian history, identity and culture.
Many of the attacks on schools in Gaza have also represented attacks on crowded shelters, as thousands of Palestinians have taken shelter in school buildings because of Israel’s forced displacement and ethnic cleansing.
Just this past week, Israel has launched several attacks on schools. On Thursday, Israeli forces killed at least 15 people and wounded 40 others in an attack on a school that was sheltering dozens of families in Gaza City. Al-Jazeera reported that many people were still trapped under the rubble after the attack.
And on Saturday, Israeli forces bombed a girls’ school in central Gaza that was sheltering 4,000 Palestinians and acted in part as a field hospital. The attack killed at least 30 people, including at least 15 children, and injured over 100 others. In the wreckage of the attack, The Washington Post reported, there appeared to be an unexploded 250-pound bomb made in the U.S.
Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate and labor
