DFLP statement on "educational genocide" in Palestine

Written by: DFLP on 22 August 2024

Above: Palestinian school children killed by Israeli bombing of Deir al-Balah

We are making available a statement sent to us by the Foreign Relations Department of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine on Israel's deliberate policy of destroying the educational infrastructure and curriculum of Palestinian education. Staff and students are frontline victims of Israel's reduction of schools and universities to rubble - eds.

Israel targets all components of education, and we will defend our present and future with all forms of resistance

The term "educational genocide" has been widely used since it was used by a group of United Nations experts in a report published last April. In this report, the experts defined the meaning of this term as "a deliberate effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an act known as educational genocide," which expresses "the systematic erasure of education through the arrest, detention, or killing of teachers, students, and employees, and the destruction of educational infrastructure."

Through the atrocities committed by the fascist occupation army in the Gaza Strip, the scale of the genocide has exceeded in its brutality all the limits of legal and humanitarian descriptions. There is a comprehensive destruction of everything on the land of the Strip, from civilian facilities (more than 150 thousand of housing units were completely destroyed, 200 thousand were partially destroyed, and 80 thousand became uninhabitable), the destruction or damage of 195 heritage sites and hundreds of hospitals and health centers, 227 mosques and 3 churches, the destruction and damage of 13 public libraries, in addition to the destruction of dozens of centers that house displaced persons and UNRWA warehouses, including areas that the occupation army designated as safe, not to mention the destruction of the headquarters of government and media institutions and cutting off water supplies and destroying water wells with the aim of making the war of hunger and thirst declared by the Israeli occupation army a success.

Since 1948, the Zionist gangs, which played a fundamental role in displacing civilians from their cities and villages by force of terror and massacres, have placed education as a direct target, by targeting schools and educational institutions that were spread throughout Palestinian cities and towns, and worked to destroy and loot them and turn some of them into military centers, as happened in the schools of Jaffa, Deir Yassin and Tantura. Which the gangs have taken as military headquarters to carry out their crimes..

At the present time, schools and universities have not been spared from the crimes of the occupation, and the criminal record of the occupation records the storming of hundreds of schools and universities and the arrest of students and members of the teaching staff, not to mention the destruction of some of them and the besieging of others, as happened in 1992 when Al-Najah National University was besieged for 4 days with more than 5,000 students, teachers and workers inside.

The occupation's war on education has increased in intensity since 2011 when it began a process of distorting the Palestinian curricula specially in East Jerusalem, and launched a propaganda campaign against these curricula, claiming that they incite terrorism, violence and hatred. On this basis, the occupation has waged numerous wars in international forums against the Palestinian curricula, and has placed the curricula of the UNRWA in the circle of direct targeting in an incitement campaign that we have never witnessed before, which has led to some countries aligning with false Israeli narratives, and making the matter of funding subject to political conditions that some European Union countries, the United States, Canada and others have begun to set.

During the previous years, the occupation threatened to demolish more than 50 schools, and actually demolished many of them in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Cases of assault on students at checkpoints were recorded, in addition to the occupation army attacking schools, throwing tear gas at them and vandalizing their contents, as well as attacking and storming universities several times, vandalizing student housing, classrooms and student bloc offices, and pursuing students and capturing thousands of them while they were in their homes or on their school benches, most of them without any charges. The occupation also refused to grant permits to renovate schools unless the occupation's official curricula are adopted at all educational levels.

Through the war of extermination that the occupation forces have been waging against civilians in the besieged Gaza Strip for (18 years), the occupation is taking education and educational institutions as direct targets, since education poses a threat to its security, as it claims.

 The result is that more than 630,000 students have been deprived of education during the current year (88,000 of whom are university students). The occupation also destroyed more than 400 educational institutions, including schools, universities and institutes in Gaza, using some university buildings as military barracks. More than 400 university professors were martyred (20 of whom held the rank of professor and 59 held doctoral degrees), and nearly ten thousand school and university students were martyred as part of the university genocide war. For the first time since the beginning of secondary school exams in Palestine, Gaza is out of the exams, after the fascist war deprived more than 36 thousand students from taking the secondary school exams that qualify them to enter university.

 According to experts, the educational process in the Gaza Strip will not return to what it was and this requires great efforts, due to the extent of the destruction and sabotage that befell the educational institutions that the occupation intended to sabotage and destroy. A number of experts have described the occupation’s aggression by the United Nations Human Rights Council as “a systematic pattern of violence aimed at dismantling the foundations of Palestinian society.” “When schools are destroyed, hopes and dreams are destroyed as well.” Isn’t what is happening in line with the UN’s definition of “educational genocide”? Indeed, what has happened on the ground is almost more widespread than the previous definition.
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 The systematic aggression and comprehensive war carried out by the Israeli occupation targeting all aspects of life and the future in the Gaza Strip, including education and culture, is something we place first in the hands of international organizations concerned with education, childhood and society issues, and even those concerned with humanitarian issues, and second in the hands of the countries allied with Israel that still claim to defend the human being and his rights, including his right to obtain education.

The "Al-Aqsa Flood" operation and the operations that preceded it and the forms of Palestinian resistance and rejection that will follow it, come within the framework of defending the present and future of the Palestinian people and their right to their land, homes, schools, universities and hospitals.. Their right to resort to all forms of resistance in order to remain free and proud, deciding their future away from occupation, colonialism and dependency. Palestine, which has been free and proud throughout history, will remain struggling for its freedom, rejecting all forms of submission and slavery.

The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine
- Department of Foreign Affairs -

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