thisweekinpalestine.com
Scholasticide
The destruction of Gaza has been documented in extraordinary detail, yet amid the catalogue of ruined neighborhoods, hospitals, and roads, one target has drawn far less attention than it warrants: education. Schools have been flattened, universities leveled, libraries burned, archives lost, and laboratories reduced to ruin even as professors have been killed alongside their students. By April 2024, United Nations experts reported that more than eighty percent of Gaza’s schools had been damaged or destroyed, and asked openly whether the pattern amounted to an intentional effort to dismantle the Palestinian education system in its entirety.1 In January 2025, members of the American Historical Association, a body not given to rhetorical excess, voted to adopt a resolution stating that the assault had destroyed the majority of Gaza’s schools and every one of its twelve university campuses.2 These losses are routinely folded into the general tragedy of war. They are something more precise.