September 9,
2024
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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