South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice to institute proceedings against Israel for its genocidal attack on Gaza makes for a chilling assessment of grievous violations of international law not only in respect to their devastating impact but what underpins them.  The application states that Israel seeks to ‘bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group’.  We are witnessing in real time the attempted erasure of Palestinian history, culture, heritage and knowledge.  The ‘manifest violation of the Genocide Convention’ set out by South Africa includes the destruction of the ‘foundations of public life’.  Among the institutions targeted by Israel in Gaza have been the central archive documenting one hundred years of Palestinian history, the public library, Gaza’s four universities, bookshops and publishing houses, culture and arts centres, museums, and ancient sites of historical interest on the UNESCO World Heritage List.  Leading Palestinian intellectuals, who collectively embodied the history, memory, heritage and culture of Gaza, have also been killed including scientists, academics, poets, story-tellers, journalists, doctors and engineers. 

Academic capacity destroyed

Israel is also destroying Gaza’s educational capacity and academic future having killed 4,037 students and 209 teachers and education workers.  An additional 7,259 students and 619 teachers have been injured.  Palestine’s top student in high school examinations in 2023, Al-Shaima Akram Saidam, was killed with several members of her family in an Israeli air strike on Nuseirat camp last October.  ‘We are not numbers’, a youth-led, non-profit project in Gaza has been established to document  the ‘daily personal struggles and triumphs, the tears and the laughter’ of young people rather than reduce their lives to a statistic that objectivises their existence instead of celebrating them. 

But the grim reality for the majority of Gaza’s children is that their lives have been upended by forced displacement, with the UN estimating that 500,000 Gazans will not have a home to return to given the number of housing units damaged or destroyed.  Having been denied food, water, medicines and fuel since the start of the current escalation, children are now subjected to the ravages of hunger and disease that include diarrhoea, upper respiratory infections, lice and scabies, chicken pox and meningitis.  These are all preventable illnesses induced by the collective punishment of what Oxfam describes as a ‘siege within a siege’ as Israel had already reduced the majority of Gazans to penury following the imposition of a blockade on the strip in 2007 described by Amnesty International as ‘illegal and inhumane’.

Education on hold

With 90 per cent of school buildings in Gaza used as emergency shelters by 1.4 million internally displaced persons, the education of 400,700 students has been put on hold.   The UN has reported 342 schools damaged since 7 October with eight completely destroyed.  The education system in Gaza was already in crisis before 7 October with over 100 UN schools operating on a double-shift basis meaning that two school populations shared the same building and the students of both schools received a part-time education.  For one school this meant starting the school day early in the morning and finishing at lunchtime with the second shift beginning in the afternoon.  The shortage of school buildings in Gaza is a consequence of Israel’s blockade and the barring of ‘dual use’ construction materials needed to build or repair public buildings.  These restrictions have extended to school supplies such as text books and stationery which is deemed by Human Rights Watch as contravening Article 50 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which requires the occupying power to ‘facilitate the proper working of all institutions devoted to the care and education of children’. 

The lack of school buildings also impacts the quality of education with class sizes in UNRWA schools before the current Israeli onslaught averaging at 41.2 with many of the teaching staff themselves refugees and living in highly stressed and impoverished conditions.  And, of course, the repeated traumas visiting on Gaza’s children as a result of constant exposure to extreme poverty and violence is causing a mental health crisis.  In June 2022, Save the Children reported that 80 per cent of children in Gaza were ‘in a perpetual state of fear, worry, sadness and grief’.  This distress was reflected in worrying behaviours such as bedwetting and reactive mutism, and impacted children’s educational performance as they struggled to concentrate in class and could either become withdrawn or disruptive. 

Solidarity and action

But what now of the children in Gaza following three months of constant bombardment, industrial carnage, the systematic targeting of life-providing services and 22,600 deaths?  With Gaza on the brink of famine, and facing the total collapse of the health system, the main priority has to be an immediate cessation of violence and humanitarian aid at scale.  The siege of Gaza should be lifted without delay and psychosocial first-aid provided to children and adults alike.  Achieving these goals means maintaining the kind of public mobilisation in solidarity with Palestine that has been evident since the start of the escalation with 7,283 pro-Palestine protests recorded in more than 118 countries and territories between 7 October and 24 November 2023.  We should draw strength from the success of the BDS movement evidenced by the recent decision by Puma not to renew its sponsorship of the Israeli football team.  We should also exhort governments in the global North to follow the lead of South Africa in referring Israel to the International Court of Justice.  There has to be accountability for the wanton slaughter of Israel in Gaza and its complete disregard for international law and human rights conventions.

Its critical, too, that educators everywhere challenge what Henry Giroux has described as the ‘tranquilization’ that has haunted and shaped mainstream media coverage of the war on Gaza.  ‘It is crucial for any analysis of the current Israel-Hamas conflict’, argues Giroux, ‘to be situated and addressed through the history and root causes that have shaped it; otherwise, the search for peace is annihilated in the militarized calls for war’.  Should our activism flag in challenging state and media complicity in sustaining the ‘historical and social amnesia’ that accompanies so much coverage of the conflict and we despair of achieving peace in Gaza, we should recall that the Palestinians are liberating us.  ‘When most would give up, their incredible endurance and selflessness is a beacon of hope for all those resisting injustice around the world’.

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Stephen McCloskey is the Director of the Centre for Global Education and Editor of Policy and Practice: A Development Education. 

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