Ashes of Knowledge
Scholasticide in Gaza
Where there was once a library, now there is a fire.
Where there were classrooms, there are tents.
Where young Palestinians once studied futures they still believed in, they now tear pages from textbooks to boil water.
This is not only displacement.
This is not only genocide.
This is Scholasticide—the systematic destruction of Palestinian education, academic institutions, and intellectual life. And in Gaza, it is burning before our eyes.
The University Becomes a Refugee Camp
Palestinian journalist and photojournalist Ruwaida Kamal Amer reports that thousands of displaced families have taken shelter in the ruins of the Islamic University of Gaza. Bombed by Israeli forces, stripped of electricity, fuel, and water, the once-prestigious academic institution has been reduced to rubble and smoke.
Now, tents line the shattered courtyards.
Students are gone. Professors are gone. Classrooms—obliterated.
With no fuel and freezing nights, families are burning books to stay alive. Not as a metaphor, not in protest—as necessity. Books now replace firewood. Academic journals become kindling. Knowledge is fed to flames for the sake of boiling rice or purifying water.
“We are looking for a square meter of land,” said Khalil Issa Naseer. “Either to pitch a tent—or to be buried in.”
Scholasticide Is a War Crime
This is not incidental. Israel has systematically targeted every university in Gaza. Twelve institutions—flattened, shuttered, or made inoperable. Campuses have become craters. Professors have been martyred. Students have been killed, imprisoned, or starved.
Scholasticide is the targeted annihilation of a people’s ability to learn, remember, and imagine. It is intellectual erasure—a form of cultural genocide aimed at crushing a population’s self-determination by destroying the systems through which it educates and sustains itself.
When you bomb a school, you don’t just kill students.
You kill the future of their community.
Why the World Is Silent
Because Western powers continue to see education as a privilege, not a right. Because Palestinian intellect, like Palestinian life, is treated as disposable. Because settler-colonial regimes fear nothing more than an oppressed people with historical clarity and political literacy.
What Israel is doing is not just military occupation. It is epistemic violence—an attempt to unwrite the Palestinian people.
The burning of books at the Islamic University is not a metaphor for the past.
It is the present condition of Gaza.
From Cradle to Classroom, Nothing Is Safe
This isn’t just war. This is a campaign of annihilation that spans the entire spectrum of life—from maternity wards to universities. The bombing of Gaza’s intellectual infrastructure is not accidental—it is a key component of the Zionist project to eliminate Palestinian identity, culture, and political continuity.
And it must be named:
This is Scholasticide.
This is cultural genocide.
This is a crime against the memory, imagination, and future of Palestine.
Thank you again.