Every university in Gaza has been damaged or destroyed. Every single one.
That sentence deserves to stand alone, because it is not a figure of speech. It is what UN human rights experts, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, and UNESCO have documented, institution by institution, campus by campus. What is happening to Palestinian higher education in Gaza is what UN Special Rapporteurs have named — and what those living through it are now learning to call — scholasticide: the systemic obliteration of an education system through the killing of its teachers, the imprisonment of its students, and the physical annihilation of its infrastructure.
This is that story.
A Word That Was Needed
The term “scholasticide” was not invented to describe what is happening in Gaza. But Gaza has given it its fullest meaning.
On 18 April 2024, a group of more than twenty UN Special Rapporteurs and independent experts issued a joint statement expressing “grave concern over the pattern of attacks on schools, universities, teachers, and students in the Gaza Strip.” OHCHR The experts — whose mandates cover education, cultural rights, health, housing, and the Palestinian occupied territories, among others — raised “serious alarm over the systemic destruction of the Palestinian education system.”
“With more than 80% of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed,” the experts wrote, “it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide.’” OHCHR
The word describes a specific set of acts: “the systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure.” OHCHR It is not a polemical flourish. It is a definition applied by recognized UN authorities to documented facts.
Those facts are precise, and they are devastating.
The Numbers: Six Months Into the Assault
By April 2024 — six months into Israel’s military assault — UN experts documented the following: more than 5,479 students killed in Gaza. OHCHR 261 teachers killed. 95 university professors killed. Over 7,819 students and 756 teachers injured. At least 60 percent of educational facilities damaged or destroyed, including 13 public libraries. At least 625,000 students with no access to education.
The destruction did not stop there. 195 heritage sites were damaged or destroyed. 227 mosques and three churches. The Central Archives of Gaza — containing 150 years of Palestinian history — was destroyed. OHCHR
By January 2026, the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights had updated the toll: 12,800 students killed, along with 760 teachers and educational staff, and 150 academics and researchers. 494 schools and universities partially or completely destroyed, with 137 reduced to rubble. Al Jazeera UNESCO estimated that more than 95 percent of higher education campuses across Gaza had been severely damaged or destroyed since the war began. Al Jazeera
More than 750,000 Palestinian students were left without schooling for two consecutive academic years. Al Jazeera
Campus by Campus: The Destruction of Gaza’s Universities
Gaza had 19 universities before October 2023. All of them sustained severe damage or were destroyed outright. +972 Magazine Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor documented that five out of six of Gaza’s main universities were either completely or partially destroyed, with three of those completely destroyed. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor According to International Monetary Fund estimates cited by Euro-Med Monitor, 70 percent of colleges and universities in Gaza have been destroyed, at a cost to the education sector of $720 million. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
The Islamic University of Gaza was one of the first to be targeted. On 11 October 2023, Israeli airstrikes bombed the campus, razing its entirety. +972 Magazine Among the demolished structures was the university’s mosque — a violation, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor noted, of international rules prohibiting attacks on places of worship. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor The damage to the College of Science building, the Deanship of Community Service and Continuing Education, and the College of Information Technology building included the destruction of furnishings, labs, and equipment.
Al-Azhar University’s main campus in Gaza City and its branch in Al-Mughraqa were destroyed through repeated Israeli airstrikes on 11 October, 4 November, and 21 November 2023. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor Before October 2023, the university comprised 12 colleges offering bachelor’s degrees in 77 majors, 33 master’s programs, and four doctoral programs, according to Muhammad Al-Wazir, a professor at the university who spoke to +972. +972 Magazine Scholars at Risk documented the bombing of Al-Azhar’s campus around November 6, 2023, noting that the Palestinian Ministry of Higher Education and Research had already condemned Israeli attacks on the university on October 11. Scholars at Risk The destruction of Al-Azhar University, Al-Wazir noted, was among the evidence South Africa presented before the International Court of Justice in its case documenting Israel’s systematic destruction of educational infrastructure. +972 Magazine
Al-Quds University was subjected to major destruction after the Israeli military stormed it on 15 November 2023, destroying parts of its headquarters and branch buildings in Gaza City. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
Al-Aqsa University in Gaza City was targeted on 6 February 2024, with two of its buildings completely destroyed by Israeli airstrikes. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
Al-Rabat College in Gaza City was completely destroyed after Israeli air raids on 9 October 2023. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
Israa University — which had become the last remaining functioning university in Gaza — was blown up by the Israeli military on 17 January 2024. OHCHR Euro-Med Monitor confirmed that the Israeli army had converted the school into military barracks and a detention center for more than two months before demolishing all its buildings and facilities. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor The university was also home to a national museum licensed by the Palestinian Ministry of Antiquities, housing over 3,000 rare antiquities. The university administration stated that Israeli soldiers looted the antiquities before destroying the museum building. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor Ahmed Juma’a, a lecturer at Israa, described the museum to +972 as “the first of its kind on the national level,” and confirmed that “the occupation soldiers and officers looted them before blowing up the museum building.” +972 Magazine
The Academics Killed: Named, Not Nameless
The physical destruction of campuses runs in parallel with the killing of the people who animated them. At least 105 Palestinian academics have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, according to the Palestinian Education Ministry’s statistics as of mid-2024. +972 Magazine Three of those killed were serving university presidents.
Dr. Sofyan Abdel Rahman Taya, 53 years old, was a physicist and president of the Islamic University of Gaza. He was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Jabalia on 2 December 2023, along with his wife, parents, and five children. +972 Magazine His research on optical waveguides and biosensors had won him multiple awards, including the Abdul Hameed Shoman Award for Young Arab Scientists and the Islamic University Award for Scientific Research. In March 2023 — seven months before his death — he had been appointed as the UNESCO Chair for Physics, Astrophysics, and Space Sciences in Palestine. +972 Magazine
His brother Nabil told +972 that Sofyan “expected to be targeted, especially after many academic and administrative staff at the Islamic University were assassinated before him” — including Omar Farwana, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, and Dr. Muhammad Shabir, former president of the university. +972 Magazine
Dr. Said Anwar Alzebda, of the University College of Applied Sciences in Gaza, was the third university president killed — along with several family members — on 31 December 2023. +972 Magazine
Dr. Khitam Al-Wasifi, head of the Physics Department at the Islamic University and vice dean of its College of Science, was killed along with her husband — also a professor at the university — and their children on 1 December 2023. +972 Magazine Known to colleagues as the “Sheikha of Physicists,” she published dozens of articles on magnetoelectricity and optoelectronics and was honored for her scholarship multiple times.
Dr. Refaat Alareer taught English literature and poetry at the Islamic University of Gaza. He was a poet, writer, editor of the collections Gaza Unsilenced and Gaza Writes Back, and co-founder of the “We Are Not Numbers” project, a Palestinian non-profit established in 2015. +972 Magazine He was killed in an Israeli airstrike on 7 December 2023. In that same strike, his brother Salah, his nephew Mohammad, his sister Asmaa, and Asmaa’s three children — Alaa, Yahya, and Muhammad — were also killed. Other family members were wounded. Three of Refaat’s sons and three daughters, who were in a different shelter at the time, survived.
His cousin, Muhammad Alareer, told +972 that Refaat “received many death threats online and via mobile phone from Israeli accounts, demanding him to stop writing and publishing.” +972 Magazine According to Muhammad, Refaat received a phone call from someone who identified himself as an Israeli officer, stating that the military knew exactly where he was and that he would be assassinated or detained if he continued writing. That threat drove Refaat to leave his wife and children at the UNRWA school in Al-Tuffah, northeast of Gaza City, and move to his sister’s house — where the airstrike killed him.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor documented that three university presidents have been killed since 7 October, along with more than 95 university deans and professors — 68 of whom held full professorships. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
Many surviving faculty members, seeing what happened to their colleagues, have concluded that prominent intellectuals are being deliberately targeted. As a result, multiple academics declined to be interviewed for +972’s reporting, fearing assassination. +972 Magazine Salah Abd El Atei, president of the International Commission to Support Palestinian Rights (Hashd), told +972 from Cairo that Israel aims “to destroy everything symbolic in Palestinian society so that the people in Gaza do not have figures they can rely on in the future.” +972 Magazine
Learning in the Ruins
Gaza’s students did not stop. That is the other part of this story.
The nearly 90,000 students enrolled in higher education institutions before the war have largely been unable to continue their studies in any normal sense. +972 Magazine Yet universities attempted to keep the academic project alive. Al-Azhar issued a statement calling on students to continue their semesters remotely. Most universities in Gaza returned to distance learning, according to Dr. Muhammad Hamdan of Al-Aqsa University, “as a way to insist on continuing students’ education.” +972 Magazine
The reality of distance learning during bombardment was described plainly by those living it. Ayman Safi, a third-year Information Technology student at Al-Azhar, told +972 that downloading academic materials requires strong internet — and he was forced to travel more than four kilometers to find a sufficient connection. He studied at night because the daylight hours were consumed by finding water and firewood, charging phone and laptop batteries, and preparing food. When he arrived at a connection point, “I have a hard time following the lectures or the information in my textbooks.” +972 Magazine
Majd Mahdi, a medical student at the Islamic University, was able to cross-register at Cairo University and An-Najah University in Nablus after her institution was destroyed. She studied from a tent in Al-Mawasi, west of Khan Younis. “We don’t have a source of electricity,” she told +972, “so every time my laptop runs out of battery, I have to go to one of the charging points.” +972 Magazine Her goal remained unchanged: “We need the help of doctors, so I hope to finish my studies and join the hospital staff so that I can assist my people.”
Gaza writer and teacher Nadera Mushtha, writing in the Electronic Intifada in January 2026, described completing four university semesters in one year — from August 2024 to December 2025 — with no breaks, as the Islamic University attempted to ensure every student received their degree on time. Electronic Intifada Exams were held on online platforms. During them, she wrote, “the internet would cut out sometimes, while at other times a neighboring house would be bombed, and smoke and shrapnel would pierce through ours.” Electronic Intifada
After the Ceasefire: Ruins as Campus
Following the October 2025 ceasefire, Gaza’s universities began a partial, painful return to in-person education.
When the Islamic University of Gaza reopened for on-site instruction, it announced that only first-year students specializing in medicine, engineering, economics and administrative sciences, health sciences, and English language would attend in person — all other students would continue online. Electronic Intifada The campus that students returned to was unrecognizable. About 500 displaced families were sheltering inside buildings reduced to hollow shells. Al Jazeera Tents filled the grounds where lecture halls once stood. Displaced families’ clotheslines stretched between walls. Vendors displayed their products in campus corridors. Hair salons operated inside the conference building — the auditorium where graduation ceremonies had been held. Electronic Intifada
“We came here after being displaced from Jabalia because we had nowhere else to go,” said Atta Siam, one of those sheltering on campus. “But this place is for education. It’s not meant to be a shelter — it’s a place for our children to study.” Al Jazeera
Only four classrooms were operational. Professor Dr. Adel Awadallah described covering exposed walls with plastic sheets to accommodate students. Borrowed generators provided electricity. Al Jazeera Mushtha, accompanying her sister Aya to register, described needing displaced families living on campus to guide her to the building with the least damage — even though she had spent two years studying there. Electronic Intifada
First-year medical student Youmna Albaba told Al Jazeera she had dreamed of a fully equipped university. “I haven’t found what I imagined here,” she said. “Still, I have hope because we are building everything from scratch.” Al Jazeera
Genocide’s Logic: Why Education Is the Target
This is not incidental destruction. It is what Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has characterized as “an additional manifestation of the ongoing crime of genocide” — and the pattern of targeting makes the logic visible. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
Dr. Ali Abu Saada, Director General of Higher Education at Gaza’s Education Ministry, told +972 that the targeting of educational institutions is “part of an effort to strip Palestinians of their essential components of life: thought, culture, and education.” +972 Magazine He argued that the destruction is calibrated to send a message: no place for education, no teachers to teach — “a reality that helps accelerate migration, which is what the occupier seeks.” +972 Magazine
Salah Abd El Atei echoed this framing: “The army has been seeking to destroy all aspects of life in the Gaza Strip, making it uninhabitable and pushing its residents to migrate to European countries.” +972 Magazine Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor stated directly that Israel’s actions fall within “its public policies of making the Gaza Strip uninhabitable and expelling its Palestinian residents” — accomplished by “establishing a coercive atmosphere devoid of basic services and necessities for survival.” Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
The UN Special Rapporteurs were unambiguous about what the pattern represents. “These attacks are not isolated incidents,” they wrote. “They present a systematic pattern of violence aimed at dismantling the very foundation of Palestinian society.” OHCHR “The foundations of Palestinian society are being reduced to rubble, and their history is being erased.” OHCHR
The targeting of intellectual life — the killing of named scholars, the deliberate demolition of institutions that took generations to build — is the targeting of a future. It is the attempt to ensure that when the rubble is eventually cleared, there will be no one left who remembers how to rebuild, no institutions around which Palestinian society can reconstitute itself, and no archive in which its history is kept. The Central Archives of Gaza, destroyed in this assault, contained 150 years of that history. OHCHR
The UN experts who issued the April 2024 statement called on the international community to “send a clear message that those who target schools and universities will be held responsible” — and stipulated that accountability includes “an obligation to finance and rebuild the education system.” OHCHR No such accountability has materialized.
What has materialized, instead, is Aya Mushtha studying engineering in a building chosen because it sustained the least damage, surrounded by classmates born in 2006 and 2007 crammed together in halls built for a fraction of them, sitting a few hundred meters from where families sleep in tents on the ruins of their university’s courtyard. “Gaza needs engineers,” she told her sister. Electronic Intifada She is right. And the people responsible for ensuring there are none are still not held to account.
Sources:
- OHCHR — “UN experts deeply concerned over ‘scholasticide’ in Gaza”
- UN ISPAL / OHCHR — “UN experts deeply concerned over ‘scholasticide’ in Gaza — OHCHR Press Release”
- Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor — “Israel’s demolition of educational institutions, cultural objects in Gaza is additional manifestation of genocide”
- Scholars at Risk — “2023-11-06 Al-Azhar University”
- The Electronic Intifada — “Going back to Gaza’s broken universities”
- +972 Magazine — “The decimation of Gaza’s academia is ‘impossible to quantify’”
- Al Jazeera — “Islamic University of Gaza resumes classes on site amid Israeli destruction”
Palestinian writer and researcher documenting life under occupation, drawing on primary sources from B’Tselem, Al-Haq, OCHA oPt, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and named scholars.