The longer Gaza's pupils are out of school, the tougher it is to secure lasting peace

In happier times, pupils attend class in a school run by UNRWA in Gaza City. The UN says 80 per cent of schools in the territory have been destroyed or damaged. AFP

The UNRWA, the UN Palestinian refugee agency, recently released its latest situation report. In it, the agency said that its facilities in Gaza had been attacked by Israel 453 times since the war began last October, and that more than 500 people sheltering in its buildings had been killed. The UN has also said that 80 per cent of schools in the territory have been destroyed or damaged.

This is “scholasticide” – the systematic destruction of the Palestinian educational system. The UNRWA, the lifeforce of Gaza, has been badly damaged. In my three decades of working in the Palestinian enclave, I’ve always relied on the UNRWA teachers, among others, to give me a solid picture of events on the ground. Earlier in the year, Israel attempted to slander the UNRWA by claiming its staff had ties to Hamas. An independent review found this claim to be false.

Nevertheless, the UNRWA’s aid was cut for months, and the agency is struggling to make up for this loss of international funding. This – plus the indiscriminate bombings of schools, the killing of the custodians of knowledge and Israeli soldiers torching Gazan libraries – is an attempt to deny Gazans their right to education.

Attacking schools wipes out a future generation’s potential. On my last trip to Gaza in the summer of 2021, I wrote a report on Gaza’s Generation Z – those under the age of 26. During previous trips, I always focused on the political or humanitarian situation. But on this trip, I spoke to young people. Afterwards, reviewing my dozens of interviews left me hopeful, having found so many talented, brilliant young people, despite Gaza’s deprivation. I truly believed these young people, largely down to their education and their thirst for more knowledge, would be the future leaders so badly needed in Palestine.

But that was before October 7.

Of Gaza’s pre-October 7 population of two million people, nearly two thirds were under 25. It is impossible to know how many of those energetic and committed young people I spoke to are now dead. How many have been forcibly deported from their homes, their schooling interrupted, their lives put on hold?

Most of the people I interviewed were multi-lingual. They spoke Arabic, sometimes Hebrew, but often flawless English despite never having left Gaza and, in many cases, a few European languages they learnt on YouTube. This was their way of opening a world that was unfairly closed to them.

The array of talent was enormous. I met computer coders at the impressive Gaza Sky Geeks, writers’ collectives like WeAreNotNumbers and the Gaza Poets’ Society, actors and dancers, solar engineers, dentists, green farmers and academics.

Each time, I walked away in awe of what they had accomplished, despite enormous obstacles. The unemployment rate at the time was close to 64 per cent, thanks to Israel and Egypt’s embargoes and border closures. And yet, these young people seemed indefatigable.

But nothing was easy. The coders couldn’t get parts for their Apple computers. The solar engineers couldn’t go to workshops outside Gaza to enhance their knowledge. The green farmers couldn’t get the tools they needed to farm the land – their water systems were routinely bombed. The female entrepreneur I met who was helping empower women with business management techniques that would make McKinsey proud couldn’t bring them to workshops in Jordan because they couldn’t get exit visas.

Yet the thing that every single one told me was how much they valued their education because it empowered them. Most were graduates of Islamic University, Al Azhar or Al Aqsa where they studied economics, literature, humanities, AI, engineering or medicine.

Islamic University was completely destroyed on October 11. Al Azhar a few days later. Al Aqsa earlier this year.

Then there are the primary schools, high schools and the nursery schools that have been wiped out. Children who were learning to read, to count, to draw, to socialise with other children, have nowhere to go. Their learning has been curtailed, cut short.

About 90,000 university students have had their education suspended; it is not just Gaza – Israel has raided educational institutions in the West Bank as well.

Why is Israel targeting schools? It appears to be a long-term goal to deprive Palestinians of their right to education. Here, there is a historic link to Israeli’s assassination of Palestinian cultural and intellectual figures who were associated with the Palestine Liberation Organisation. This is nothing new.

In Gaza, the Israelis claim that Hamas hides fighters inside schools. They also accuse Hamas of using civilians as human shields. But as Ken Roth, the former director of Human Rights Watch pointed out in a recent essay on war crimes in Gaza, such actions do not justify “attacks that are indiscriminate or cause disproportionate harm to civilians”. “Palestinian civilians are still civilians even if Hamas is endangering them,” he adds.

Equally, attacks on schools breach the right to education and can constitute war crimes. Schools must be zones of peace.

However, so far in this war, hundreds of schools have been destroyed. Thousands of teachers and students have been killed. Gaza’s educational system has been ravaged and the trauma will be felt for decades to come. Those young people who might have gone far and who might have been the ones brokering peace in the region one day are either dead or will be deprived of education. The greatest tool for building peace is education. Without it, we have anarchy.

A recent open letter by Gazan academics to scholars and university administrators around the world contained a plea “to work alongside us in building our demolished universities and to refuse all plans seeking to bypass, erase or weaken the integrity of our academic institutions”.

The priorities in Gaza are to establish a complete ceasefire and a return to some kind of normal life. Schools, universities and libraries must also be rebuilt. Students must be supported. The longer pupils are out of school, the harder it will be for them to catch up, and the fewer chances we will have to reach a lasting and sustainable peace.