The scale and speed of the destruction of Gaza’s education system, including higher education, has been shocking. Since October, 2023, all university campuses in Gaza have been subject to intensive bombing, with dozens of buildings completely destroyed and many more irreparably damaged.
Israeli soldiers have bragged about this destruction on social media.
Hundreds of university staff have been killed, including deans and heads of department, sometimes in their own homes with their families. Thousands of students have been killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza. Formal education has been brought to a complete standstill.
The targeted destruction and systematic undermining of education at all levels in Palestine is not a new phenomenon. Schools and universities in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem have for decades been subject to closure, military incursions and missile strikes by Israeli forces. Students and staff have faced censorship, travel restrictions, financial disruption, arrest and detention.
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That international law is being violated in Gaza by Israel’s decimation of third-level education is beyond debate. The attacks on university staff and infrastructure violates fundamental principles of international humanitarian law, including distinction and proportionality, and are in breach of numerous human rights, including the right to education.
Both the United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council have passed resolutions expressing concern about attacks on education in wartime and called upon parties to strictly observe their international law obligations during armed conflict.
The attacks on students, staff and university premises in Gaza, such is their gravity, amount to international crimes. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court includes the specific war crime of “intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to ... education ... provided they are not military objectives”.
The widespread and systematic nature of the attack on third-level education also entails crimes against humanity. International tribunals for Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia have dealt with deliberate and discriminatory attacks on education.
UN human rights experts have invoked the term “scholasticide” to encapsulate the assault on Gaza’s education system. It forms part of the broader attack on Palestinian life in Gaza, where essentials have been destroyed or denied - water, food, electricity, fuel, and medical supplies.
[ Israel ‘obliged’ to support relief efforts in Gaza Strip, says World CourtOpens in new window ]
The crime of genocide right before our eyes.
The United Nations International Independent Commission of Inquiry concluded recently that Israel’s destruction of the education system in Gaza was aimed at erasing Palestinian identity, denying refuge and inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction, in whole or in part, of Palestinians in the territory.
Despite the overwhelming evidence, the flagrant illegality, the profound damage to Palestinian self-determination, the protests and the pleas, these crimes continue without pause.
The international community has utterly failed to bring them to an end.
International law, while not without its flaws, provides the standards which show that Israel’s Gaza campaign is unlawful and indeed criminal in many respects. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Binyamin Netanyahu (Prime Minister of Israel) and Yoav Gallant (former minister of defence) for starvation, murder, persecution and attacks on civilian objects. The International Court of Justice has found a plausible case of genocide in the early stages of the case taken by South Africa against Israel.
Taken together with the 2024 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, which found that Israel’s presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is unlawful and must be brought to an end “as rapidly as possible”, States have been given ample legal ammunition to take meaningful action. But they have not done so.
International law requires State action to be enforced. Arrest warrants are not automatically executed and nor are findings of the highest international courts immediately observed in a decentralised and highly politicised system. The use of sanctions, whether against individuals, companies or States, is an accepted and relatively uncontroversial tool of enforcement. Except for Israel, which has largely avoided any significant sanctions to date.
Key States and international organisations, including the United Nations and European Union, are either unwilling or unable to act.
What is ongoing in Gaza will soon come to the West Bank. The past 23 months have seen an ever-increasing number of attacks by settlers, the continued expansion of settlements, violent military incursions and even further constrictions on Palestinian cities, towns and villages.
Schools and universities have not escaped this increased repression. Israeli forces have frequently raided West Bank universities, while travel restrictions seriously impede the delivery of education.
Israeli ministers Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich make no secret of their desire to annex the West Bank and defeat any prospect of a Palestinian State. They have succeeded in driving scorched-earth and genocidal practices in Gaza. The evidence suggests they will do the same in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
It is just a matter of time.
We have observed and some of us are living through Israel’s scholasticide in Palestine. As international lawyers, we struggle to retain faith in a legal system that has failed Palestinians so abjectly. We have exhausted the system, only for States to fail to do their part and take anything approaching meaningful sanctions against Israel.
Piecemeal financial measures against a handful of individuals, the temporary halting of certain weapons sales or the very limited trade restrictions relating to illegal settlements are grossly insufficient to meet States existing legal obligations. The duties to prevent genocide, to ensure respect for international humanitarian law or to not aid or assist an internationally wrongful act have been rendered hollow in the case of Palestine.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that when the attacks by Israel on the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including institutions of third-level education, are escalated even further, neither the international legal system nor the so-called international community can or will intervene meaningfully to stop it.
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Urgent action, such as trade sanctions and arms embargoes, must be taken without any further delay if this unconscionable situation is to be brought to an end.
- Dr Munir Nuseibah (Al Quds University), Prof Shane Darcy (University of Galway), Bisan Abtli (An Najah University), Dr Mais Qandeel (University of Galway), Dr John Reynolds (Maynooth University).
