Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s schools is meant to quash the Palestinian spirit of resistance through learning.
When on July 29, the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education announced the results of the tawjihi high school general matriculation exam, Sara wept. The 18-year-old saw on social media the joyous celebrations of other students in the occupied West Bank who were revelling in their achievements.
“I was supposed to be happy at this time, celebrating the completion of my high school,” she told me with tearful eyes when I visited her in her family tent in Gaza. “I dreamed of being among the top students and having interviews to celebrate my success.”
Sara was studying at Zahrat Al-Madain Secondary School in Gaza City and aspired to become a doctor. The matriculation exam, for which she would have studied hard for months, would have allowed her to apply to study in a medical faculty. The score of the exam is the main criterion for admission to Palestinian universities.
Instead, Sara spends her time despairing – her home and dreams of a better future destroyed by Israeli bombardment.
She is one of 39,000 Palestinian students in Gaza who were supposed to take the matriculation exam this year but could not.
But Sara is one of the “lucky” ones. Of those students who were supposed to finish high school, at least 450 have been killed, according to the Palestinian Education Ministry. More than 5,000 others of various grades have also died in Israel’s genocidal aggression on Gaza along with more than 260 teachers.
Scores of these high school seniors have probably been killed in schools, which have been turned into shelters for displaced Palestinians since the Gaza war began. There is a dark irony here that the places of learning and enlightenment in Gaza have been turned into places of death.
Since July, Israel has bombed schools 21 times with massive casualty numbers. In the latest attack, al-Tabin school in Gaza City became the graveyard of more than 100 people, the majority of them women and children. Horrific reports described parents looking for their children in vain, as the bombs had ripped them into small pieces.
According to the United Nations, 93 percent of Gaza’s 560 schools have been either destroyed or damaged since October 7. About 340 have been directly bombarded by the Israeli army. They include government and private schools as well as those run by the UN itself. By now it is clear that Israel is systematically targeting Gaza’s schools and there is a reason for it.
For Palestinians, educational spaces have historically served as vital hubs for learning, revolutionary activism, cultural conservation and the preservation of relations between Palestinian lands cut off from each other by Israeli colonisation. Schools have always played a crucial role in the empowerment and movement for liberation of the Palestinian people.
In other words, education has been a form of Palestinian resistance to Israeli attempts to erase the Palestinian people since the Nakba of 1948. When Jewish militia forces ethnically cleansed and expelled about 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland, one of the first things they did when they settled down in refugee camps was to open schools for their children. Education was elevated to a national value. This drove the development of the Palestinian education sector to the point where it delivered some of the highest literacy rates in the world.
It is not a coincidence that an impoverished, besieged and regularly bombarded Gaza has traditionally been the home of some of the top scorers on the tawjihi exam. Tales abound of Gaza students receiving some of the highest scores after studying by the light of oil lamps or mobile phones during regular blackouts or refusing to stop even while Israel bombarded the enclave. Excelling in one’s studies despite all odds has been a form of resistance – whether young people in Gaza have been aware of it or not.
What Israel is doing now is trying to destroy this form of Palestinian resistance by committing scholasticide. It is dismantling educational and cultural institutions to eradicate the avenues through which the Palestinians can preserve and share their culture, knowledge, history, identity and values across generations. Scholasticide is a critical aspect of genocide.
For the students on the receiving end of this genocidal campaign, the destruction of the education sector has had a devastating impact. Education, for many, also gave hope that life could get better for them, that they could pull their families out of poverty through hard work.
I thought of the spread of hopelessness among Gaza’s children and youth when I saw 18-year-old Ihsan selling handmade desserts under the scorching sun on a dusty street in Deir el-Balah. I asked him why he was out in the heat. He told me he spends his days selling handmade desserts to earn a small amount of money to help his family survive.
“I have lost my dreams. I dreamed of becoming an engineer, opening my own business, working in a company, but all of my dreams now have been turned into ashes,” he said in despair.
Like Sara, Ihsan too would have taken the tawjihi exam by now and looked forward to studying at a university.
I see in Gaza so many bright young people like Sara and Ihsan who were meant to celebrate their high school achievements and are now mourning the dreams that have been violently snatched away from them. Those who could have been future doctors and engineers of Gaza now spend their days struggling to find food and water to barely survive as they are surrounded by death and despair.
But the resistance is not all dead. The yearning for education among Palestinians in destroyed Gaza has not disappeared. I was reminded of that when I visited six-year-old Masa and her family in their tent in Deir el-Balah. While I was speaking to her mother, who was telling me how her heart ached every time her daughter cried because she could not go to school, Masa kept pleading:
“Mom, I want to go to school. Let’s go to the market and buy me a bag and a school uniform.” Masa would have started first grade in September. This month would have been the time to shop for all the school supplies, a uniform and a schoolbag, which would have brought her immense joy.
While today Palestinian children’s pleas to go to school are leaving many parents heartbroken, this thirst for education will drive the rebuilding of Gaza’s education sector tomorrow when this genocidal hell is over.
In a recent open letter, hundreds of scholars and university staff from Gaza emphasised that “the rebuilding of Gaza’s academic institutions is not just a matter of education; it is a testament to our resilience, determination, and unwavering commitment to securing a future for generations to come.”
Indeed, many Palestinians aspire to reconstruct the educational institutions essential for their communal life and liberation, embodying the principle of sumud, or steadfastness. To paraphrase the concluding sentence of that letter: Many schools in Gaza, especially in its refugee camps, were built from tents, and Palestinians – with the support of their friends – will rebuild them from tents again.
