Israel has attacked 16 schools in Gaza in the past six weeks, killing hundreds of Palestinians, rights group Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported this week — as hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza should have been starting a new school year.
According to Euro-Med Monitor, Israel has killed 217 Palestinians across 16 schools now functioning as shelters in Gaza since the beginning of August. These attacks have also injured hundreds, the group says.
The group says that this is part of an escalation of school attacks carried out by Israel in recent weeks, amounting to roughly one school bombing every two days.
“There is no legitimate reason to target schools above the heads of displaced individuals, and this act is a blatant violation of the principles of distinction, military necessity, proportionality, and the obligation to exercise appropriate caution,” Euro-Med Monitor wrote. “Every time it launches an attack, the Israeli army attempts to justify its actions by claiming that it is attacking military targets, but it never offers any proof to support these assertions.”
The latest attack came on Saturday, when Israeli forces bombed a school north of Gaza City, the Amr Ibn al-Aas School, killing at least three and wounding at least 20 in the attack on the now-shelter for displaced Palestinians.
Euro-Med Monitor also noted that a recent report by Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth found that the Israeli military is currently developing a plan to forcibly displace every Palestinian who still remains in northern Gaza, known as the “Generals’ Plan.”
Israel’s attacks on schools in Gaza are not only a means of exterminating Palestinians, but also a means of decimating Gaza’s education system, which has played a critical role in preserving Palestinian history and in shaping generations of anti-colonial struggle.
Euro-Med Monitor published its report on Sunday, at the start of what should have been the first week of the new school year in Gaza. Because of Israel’s genocide, schools have been closed for nearly a full year, and 630,000 children in Gaza have been deprived of schooling. This includes nearly 40,000 students who were supposed to finish their final year of grade school and take their qualifying exams in the last school year — but were blocked from doing so by Israel.
Human rights experts have warned that a second year without schooling for the children of Gaza will severely hamper their development for decades to come, and could potentially lead to many children never returning to school.
The Palestinian education ministry has said that Israel has killed over 750 education workers since October and injured thousands more.
Meanwhile, even if Israel were to withdraw from Gaza tomorrow — an extremely unlikely scenario — it would likely take years to rebuild Gaza’s education infrastructure. About 85 percent of schools have been so thoroughly destroyed by Israeli forces that they would need to undergo full or major reconstruction, according to the UN, while over 90 percent of Gaza’s schools have been damaged by Israel. Israel has also either totally destroyed or severely damaged every university in Gaza.
At the same time, Israel has directly targeted children in Gaza, killing them en masse, orphaning 20,000 children or more, and rendering at least 21,000 children missing, separated from their families or buried under the rubble.
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