“Every place in Gaza is a target”—these are the words of Ahmed Abed, whose brother-in-law was brutally murdered in an Israeli airstrike on the al-Taba’een school in the early morning of Aug. 10. Gruesome videos from the aftermath of the attack flooded social media, but people have become accustomed to these scenes after nearly a year of horrifying acts committed by the IDF in Gaza.
The month prior, the IDF launched airstrikes on 17 Gazan schools. A week before the al-Taba’een massacre, they destroyed nine schools, killing over 100 civilians. The destruction of educational infrastructure—areas designated by both the UN and Israel as “safe-zones”—has become such a clear trend for the IDF that a term was coined to describe it: scholasticide. It should be no surprise then that so many students here are eager to fight, having watched the scholasticide of Gaza happen in real time.
In the first two days of the current genocidal offensive, Al-Azhar University and the Islamic University of Gaza were hit with Israeli airstrikes. In the first two months, nine more universities were reduced to rubble. In the first week of 2024—after 100 days of genocide—the IDF destroyed al-Israa University, the last university in Gaza. In an interview with Communist Revolution, Zakaria Helles, a Gazan assistant professor at Laval University, said, “Gaza has no army. There are no military buildings to remove, so they remove what remains—innocent civilians.”
Education is a pillar of Palestinian society, leading to their reputation as the world’s “best-educated refugees” and a literacy rate of nearly 98 per cent. “The youth are the future” is a commonly repeated refrain; with Gaza’s median age being only 20 Israel’s “scholasticide” should be understood as a war on the future of Gaza and the Palestinian people. The situation today shows 85 per cent of schools in Gaza bombed, over 5,000 students dead, and hundreds of teachers and professors killed.
But Canadian university administrations don’t care about any of that, and are more than happy to fund it. They have no issue investing their students’ tuition into the weapons that leveled all of Gaza’s universities. This is exactly why Canadian students need to shut down their universities with a student strike. There can be no business as usual at our universities while there are no universities left in Gaza.
