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, 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 the schools and all the universities. All of them. A few months ago, a panel of UN experts said, “With more than 80 percent 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.’”
“School Year,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024.
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 behavior 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 percent budget shortfall. While the US sent $20 billion in weaponry to Israel for the ongoing butchery, it gave UNICEF $1.5 billion 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 U.S. presidential election. Trump tells Netanyahu to “finish the job.” The “job” is creating more amputees like 13-year-old Malek.
COMMENTS