Scholasticide in Gaza

Scholasticide is the deliberate destruction of an educational system and its institutions. The term was first coined by Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian Professor of Politics at Oxford University and an expert on the laws of war. The immediate context was Operation Cast Lead of December 2008, the first major Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip after the unilateral disengagement of August 2005. The broader context was Zionist settler-colonialism and its attacks on Palestinian scholars, students, and educational institutions since the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948. The term combines the Latin prefix schola, meaning school, and the Latin suffix ‘cide’, meaning killing. Nabulsi used it to describe the ‘systematic destruction of Palestinian education by Israel’ and the tradition of Palestinian learning. That tradition, Nabulsi observed, revolves round the pivotal ‘role and power of education in an occupied society’ in which freedom of thought ‘posits possibilities, opens horizons’, in sharp contrast with ‘the apartheid wall, the shackling checkpoints, and the choking prisons’. Recognising ‘how important education is to the Palestinian tradition and the Palestinian revolution’, Nabulsi noted that Israeli colonial policymakers ‘cannot abide it and have to destroy it’ (Ahmad & Vulliamy 2009).

Zionism is a settler-colonial movement, just like its principal political progeny, the State of Israel. The logic of settler-colonialism is to weaken and, if possible, to eliminate the indigenous community. One means of weakening an indigenous community is to curb its intellectual development. Zionist attacks on Palestinian educational institutions go back to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. In the course of the first Arab–Israeli war, Palestinian colleges and most Islamic and Christian educational institutions inside what later became Israel, were destroyed. Between 1948 and 1967, development of higher education was suspended throughout historic Palestine, and when it started to evolve again, it came under attack by Israeli authorities (Qumsiyeh & Banat 2024).

Israel captured the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the course of the June 1967 Arab–Israeli war and soon after began to build civilian settlements there—in clear violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Military occupation, which was supposed to be temporary, pending a diplomatic resolution of the conflict, morphed into a typical colonial situation. The Gaza Strip is not backward and impoverished because of objective conditions but because Israel’s rapacious colonial regime did not give it a chance to flourish. Economic progress was thwarted by a deliberate Israeli strategy of ‘de-development’, a pivotal concept coined by Sara Roy in her ground-breaking book The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development. Her powerful thesis is that the dire state of Gaza is not the result of objective conditions but of a deliberate Israeli policy of keeping it under-developed and dependent. The book shows in detail the various measures by which Israel systematically thwarted the growth of industry in the Gaza Strip and exploited the enclave as a source of cheap labour as well as a market for its own goods (Roy 1995).

In 2005, when the population of Gaza stood at 1.4 million, a tiny minority of 8,000 Jewish settlers controlled 25 per cent of the territory, 40 per cent of the arable land, and the lion’s share of the scarce water resources. In that year, a right-wing Israeli government headed by Ariel Sharon carried out a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. This move was presented as a generous gesture towards the people of Gaza, as an opportunity to turn their crowded enclave into the Singapore of the Middle East. In reality, Israel’s withdrawal effectively turned the Strip into the biggest open-air prison in the world.

Although Israel withdrew its settlers and soldiers from Gaza, under international law it remained the occupying power because it continued to control access to the enclave by land, sea, and air. In January 2006, Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, won an absolute majority in a fair and free election that took place across Palestine, including Gaza, and proceeded to form a government. Israel refused to recognise this government and resorted to a series of economic, diplomatic, and military measures to undermine it. The United States and European Union also refused to recognise this democratically elected Palestinian government and joined Israel in economic warfare to undermine it. This was a quintessential example of Western hypocrisy. Western leaders loudly proclaim their dedication to democracy, but when the people vote for the ‘wrong’ bunch of politicians, they refuse to accept the result. In March 2007, Hamas formed a national unity government with its rival Fatah and offered Israel negotiations on a long-term truce. Israel refused to negotiate and encouraged Fatah to mount a coup to drive Hamas out of power. In June 2007, Hamas pre-empted the coup and consolidated its control over the Gaza Strip while Israel tightened its blockade of Gaza. A blockade is a form of collective punishment which is proscribed by international law.

The illegal blockade was followed by a series of Israeli military offensives against Gaza. Operation Cast Lead of December 2008 was followed by military offensives in 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021, 2022, and 2023. These military offensives or mini-wars were directed against Hamas, but because they invariably involved the deliberate targeting of civilians, they should be seen as attacks on the people of Gaza as a whole (Shlaim 2019). Israeli generals refer to these recurrent incursions as ‘mowing the lawn’, implying a mechanical action that has to be repeated periodically without an end in sight. The idea is to attack Gaza every few years with massive land, sea, and air forces, to degrade the military capability of Hamas, to damage the civilian infrastructure, and to withdraw without seeking to address the political roots of the problem. Under this grim rubric, the next war is always just round the corner (Rabbani 2014).

The current war in Gaza was provoked by a Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 at the Israeli Supernova music festival, in which 1,195 Israelis were killed (including 815 civilians) and 251 were taken hostage, culminating in the deadliest massacre in Israeli history. Previous attacks had taken the form of rockets fired by Hamas’s military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, from inside Gaza against settlements in southern Israel. This one involved the breaking down of the fence surrounding Gaza by Hamas, other resistance groups, and unaffiliated civilians, and an unprecedented incursion by land and paragliders into Israel. Initially, the Palestinian groups attacked military bases and killed around 380 soldiers and security personnel. Later came the indiscriminate attack on civilians in the course of which serious atrocities were committed. The attack on civilians was roundly and rightly condemned by the international community. Yet it did not happen in a vacuum; it happened in the context of decades of occupation, the most prolonged and brutal military occupation of modern times.

Israel claims the right to self-defence. Under international laws, however, a state does not have the right to self-defence against a people it occupies. It is the people who live under military occupation who have the right to resist, including the right to armed resistance.¹ In any case, even if Israel had the right to self-defence, its response to the Hamas attack had to be within the limits set by international law. Israel’s response, Operation Swords of Iron, to give it its official name, has not conformed to international humanitarian law, and it most certainly has not been proportionate in its execution. All of Israel’s previous military offensives involved death and destruction for the people of Gaza. Operation Swords of Iron escalated the death and destruction to an entirely new and totally unjustifiable level.

In the first year of the war the Israeli army killed at least 44,786 Palestinians and injured 106,188.² Women and children accounted for around 70 per cent of the casualties, prompting some commentators to call it a war on children. 25,000 children have been orphaned. A new category was invented—WCNSF which stands for Wounded Children No Surviving Relatives. This chilling abbreviation became commonplace. About 80 per cent of the adult and child victims were killed in residential buildings or similar housing. UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said in a statement that ‘this unprecedented level of killing, and injury of civilians is a direct consequence of the failure to comply with fundamental principles of international humanitarian law’. He cited the laws of distinction, which requires warring parties to distinguish between combatants and civilians, proportionality, which prohibits attacks where harm to civilians outweighs military advantage, and the duty to take precautions in attacks (OHCHR 2024b).

About 80 per cent of the housing units and civilian infrastructure in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged. Over 90 per cent of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million have been displaced, some of them upwards of ten times, and many of them were subjected to aerial bombardment after obeying the order to evacuate. The forcible displacement of civilians is a war crime, a war crime that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) commit on a daily basis. Civilians have borne the brunt of the IDF attacks in Gaza. The war has caused unprecedented levels of death, injury, starvation, illness, and disease. Whole families have been killed in places of shelter, such as UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) schools. Thirty-one out of thirty-six hospitals have been damaged or destroyed by IDF fire, drastically reducing their ability to attend to the sick and injured. People have been pushed beyond breaking point and made to endure almost unparalleled suffering. Israel, with the support of its Western arms suppliers, has rendered the Gaza Strip uninhabitable. The destruction is not simply ‘collateral damage’ but a deliberate means towards its broader goal, namely, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the erasure of the Palestinian identity.

Scholasticide is one of the multiple crimes being committed by Israel in Gaza in pursuit of this broader goal. It encompasses not only the killing of educators and the destruction of educational institutions, but the infliction of bodily and/or mental harm on students, teachers, and affiliated staff members; the prevention of scholarly exchange, including the denial of visas and residency permits for academics seeking opportunities abroad; various forms of intimidation designed to inhibit access to education; the restriction of vital resources, including the internet and electricity; the disruption of funding for educational purposes; and the denial of education to political prisoners or detainees (Scholars Against War n.d.). Scholasticide is imbedded in the broader web of destruction, which includes domicide, the destruction of residential houses; ecocide, the destruction of the ecology; economicide, the destruction of the economy; memoricide (Masalha 2012, especially Chapter 2), the erasure of memories and reminders of past events; and historicide, the destruction of cemeteries and ancient sites.

As part of its campaign against the people of Gaza, Israel has pursued the wholesale destruction of the Palestinian educational system. This is a war crime according to Article 56 of the Hague Regulations, which prohibits ‘all seizure of, and destruction, or intentional damage done to’ educational, charitable, cultural, and religious institutions (Amnesty International 2024). Schools and all other educational facilities are in theory protected by international humanitarian law but have not been spared by the IDF. In the first eleven months of the war, 85 per cent of schools (477 out of 564) were hit or damaged, with 396 school buildings directly hit, and at least 9,839 pupils and 411 teachers and staff were killed (reliefweb 2024). After thirteen months, UNICEF reported that more than 95 per cent of schools in Gaza had been partially or completely destroyed, and that 87 per cent would require significant reconstruction before they could function again. Meanwhile, 658,000 school-aged children in Gaza have been deprived of all formal learning activities. Satellite imagery has suggested that schools are now being used for military operations, including detention and interrogation (Amnesty International 2024).

When the war broke out, Gaza had eleven functioning universities: Al-Aqsa University; Al-Azhar University—Gaza; Al-Quds Open University; Gaza University; Islamic University of Gaza; Israa University; Palestine Technical College; University College of Applied Sciences; University of Palestine; Gaza Community/Training Center; and Hassan University. Each and every one of these institutions of higher education were bombed by the IDF; some of them were totally destroyed, others were taken over as military bases or centres for the interrogation and torture of detainees. This barbaric assault on the infrastructure of higher education left 88,000 students unable to continue their studies. By January 2024, just four months into the war, Israel had destroyed the last remaining university in Gaza: Israa University. UN experts made a statement denouncing the scholasticide as part of ‘a systematic pattern of violence aimed at dismantling the very foundation of Palestinian society’ (OHCHR 2024a).

On 18 April 2024, on the seventh month of the war, a group of UN experts expressed grave concern over the pattern of attacks on schools, universities, teachers, and students in the Gaza Strip, raising serious alarm over the systemic destruction of the Palestinian education system. ‘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 experts said. ‘The persistent, callous attacks on educational infrastructure in Gaza have a devastating long-term impact on the fundamental rights of people to learn and freely express themselves, depriving yet another generation of Palestinians of their future …. When schools are destroyed, so too are hopes and dreams’ (OHCHR 2024a).

To destroy hopes and dreams, Israel specifically targeted the top echelon of academics. This was the academic equivalent of Israel’s long-standing policy of decapitating Hamas and Hezbollah. The deceased include Professor Sufian Tayeh, President of the Islamic University of Gaza, UNESCO chair in astronomy, astrophysics, and space sciences; Dr Ahmed Hamdi Abo Absa, Dean of the University of Palestine’s software engineering department (following three days of custody), shot and killed by Israeli forces as he was leaving his campus building; and Muhammad Eid Shabir, former president of the Islamic University of Gaza, a virologist and immunologist, assassinated by Israeli military forces (Qumsiyeh & Banat 2024). Perhaps the best known academic targeted in the current war was Refaat Alareer, Professor of Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at the Islamic University of Gaza. A renowned poet, staunch advocate of Palestinian liberation, and a beloved teacher, he was killed by Israeli forces in December 2023 in an apparently targeted airstrike (Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor 2023).

Israel’s motives for attacking schools and universities remain disputed. Israel claims it attacks educational institutions because they are used by Hamas as command and control centres and that this turns them into legitimate military targets. But it has failed to provide reliable evidence to support this claim. Israel also claims that Hamas regularly uses civilians as human shields, which constitutes a war crime. Part of the justification for this claim lies in the fact that Hamas officials have directed civilians in some areas of Gaza to remain in their homes after Israeli orders to evacuate. However, the repeated Israeli attacks on ‘safe’ humanitarian areas, which BBC Verify analysis reveals have been hit over 97 times since May, killing 550 people, suggest another plausible motive (Garman & Irvine-Brown 2025). In any case, Israel is still obliged under international law to protect civilians, as Amnesty International UK (2024) reminds us in their recent Q&A on Gaza. It is worth noting that Israel has not produced conclusive evidence of Hamas using human shields. On the contrary, there is ample evidence from various sources, including Israeli sources like the non-governmental organisation Breaking the Silence (Tantesh et al. 2024) and the newspaper Haaretz (Kubovich & Hauser Tov 2024), alongside photographic footage by Al-Jazeera that the IDF uses Palestinian civilians as human shields (Gordon 2024). Scrutiny of IDF actions on the ground suggests that they are part and parcel of a policy aimed at the systematic obliteration of Palestinian education through the arrest, detention, or killing of teachers, students, and staff, and the destruction of the entire educational infrastructure.

Another strand of Israel’s policy is the attack on the Palestinian health system: thirty-one of Gaza’s thirty-six hospitals have been either destroyed by the IDF or so badly damaged as to render them non-functional. Especially sinister is the targeting of medical schools. Human Rights Watch reported that Israeli forces have arbitrarily detained Palestinian healthcare workers in Gaza, deported them to detention facilities in Israel, and allegedly ill-treated them. The detention of healthcare workers in the context of the Israeli military’s repeated attacks on hospitals in Gaza has contributed to the catastrophic degradation of the besieged territory’s healthcare system. Released doctors, nurses, and paramedics described to Human Rights Watch their mistreatment in Israeli custody, including humiliation, beatings, forced stress positions, prolonged cuffing and blindfolding, and denial of medical care. They also reported torture, including rape and sexual abuse by Israeli forces (Human Rights Watch 2024). Dr Adnan Al-Bursh, the head of orthopaedics at Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital was severely tortured and, in the opinion of UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, ‘likely raped to death’ (Speakman Cordall 2024). By bombing medical schools, Israel is preventing a younger generation of healthcare workers from being trained to take the place of the dead ones.

Scholasticide is closely connected with the cultural genocide that Israel has also been committing in the Gaza Strip. The Ministry of Religious Affairs in Gaza announced, on 6 October 2024, that Israel had destroyed 79 per cent of the mosques during its war against Palestinians. The Israeli army flattened 814 of Gaza’s 1,245 mosques and severely damaged another 148 during its intensified bombardment (Middle East Eye 2024). The Great Mosque of Gaza, also known as the Great Omari Mosque, the largest and oldest mosque in all of Gaza, was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike.

Along with the mosques, three churches were also destroyed, and nineteen of the sixty cemeteries were deliberately targeted according to the ministry. In addition, 195 heritage sites, sixty per cent of the bookshops, and thirteen libraries have been damaged or destroyed, including the Central Archives of Gaza, containing 150 years of history. Among Israel’s other targets were publishing houses, cultural centres, museums, historic homes, and archaeological sites. The targeted assassination of public intellectuals, in addition to physical monuments, is nothing new. It is the continuation of a long-standing Israeli government policy of eliminating public figures associated with the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), such as the novelist Ghassan Kanafani in 1972 (TRTWorld 2024).

Scholasticide is only one aspect of Israel’s multi-pronged attempt to eradicate the Palestinian identity in Gaza. Israel has also been arguably engaged in the crime of crimes—genocide. Genocide is intimately connected with scholasticide. Raphael Lemkin, the pioneering Polish Jewish legal scholar who coined the term genocide and played a key role in inserting it into international law, saw genocide as an effort to ‘undermine the fundamental basis of the social order’. Key to this effort, in Lemkin’s view, is the assault on the cultures of national, ethnic, racial, or religious collectivities.

The Lemkin Institute began warning of the potential for genocidal violence by Israel after the beginning of the war, releasing a statement that identified and condemned atrocities by both Hamas and Israel. On 27 October, the Lemkin Institute stated that ‘[Israel and the US] are committing genocide in Gaza’. The institute has also criticised Western media coverage of the war for ‘avoiding historical context’, ‘shifting responsibility away’ from the state of Israel, and ‘ensuring the public will remain ignorant’ of the relevant international law (Lemkin Institute 2023).

The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as ‘a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part’. When looking at the whole spectrum of policies pursued by Israel in Gaza since the Hamas attack, it is hard to resist the conclusion that it is guilty of genocide. Scholasticide is one layer of Israel’s systematic campaign to destroy the Palestinians as a national group. Destroying schools and universities is only one aspect, but a crucially important aspect, of a deliberate policy of destroying the institutions that bind Palestinian society together.

By its own actions in Gaza, Israel has relegated itself increasingly to the status of an international pariah. Unconditional Western support has enabled Israel to literally get away with murder. The wheels of international justice grind slowly, but they have started to move. Israel is currently on trial for genocide in the International Court of Justice at The Hague. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for war crimes for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Minister of Defence, Yoav Gallant. This is hugely significant at the symbolic as well as the practical level. The leaders of a country that once claimed to be ‘a light unto the nations’, have ended up as fugitives from international justice.

The horror scenes that are live-streamed daily from Gaza are the culmination of a century of Zionist settler-colonialism, which is inherently violent and expansionist with the ultimate goal of ethnically cleansing the entire native population. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, articulated the connection with luminous clarity. In her 25 March 2024 report to the UN Human Rights Council, ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’, she wrote: ‘Israel’s actions have been driven by a genocidal logic integral to its settler-colonial project in Palestine, signalling a tragedy foretold.’ The tragedy may eventually overwhelm its own perpetrators. Colonial regimes often become particularly violent before their demise.

Academics in Gaza have been placed under unprecedented and unbearable pressure by the occupation forces. A group of academics and administrators of Gaza universities issued the following appeal for action:

We have come together as Palestinian academics and staff of Gaza universities to affirm our existence, the existence of our colleagues and our students, and the insistence on our future, in the face of all current attempts to erase us. The Israeli occupation forces have demolished our buildings but our universities live on. We reaffirm our collective determination to remain on our land and to resume teaching, study, and research in Gaza, at our own Palestinian universities, at the earliest opportunity. 

We call upon our friends and colleagues around the world to resist the ongoing campaign of scholasticide in occupied Palestine, to work alongside us in rebuilding our demolished universities, and to refuse all plans seeking to bypass, erase, or weaken the integrity of our academic institutions. The future of our young people in Gaza depends upon us, and our ability to remain on our land in order to continue to serve the coming generations of our people …

Education is not just a means of imparting knowledge; it is a vital pillar of our existence and a beacon of hope for the Palestinian people (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies 2024).

Will British academia heed their call?

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Francesca Vawdrey for her help with this article.

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Avi Shlaim is an Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy. His books include Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (Columbia University Press, 1988); War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History (Penguin, 1995); The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (W W Norton, 2000, updated edition 2014); Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace (Vintage, 2007); Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (Verso, 2009); Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab-Jew (Oneworld, 2023); and Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine (Irish Pages Press, 2025).