Education Under Siege: Gaza’s Struggle for Knowledge and Dignity

Ayaisha Alsaedi | ayaisha.alsaedi@yale.edu

Tents that once hosted final exams, weddings, and funerals are now packed with Palestinian families—bound by displacement and not by blood. School desks are being used as partitions to create “family units” and chalkboards fuel cooking fires. Children once wore headphones to drown out the noise of bombings. Now they’ve given up that small comfort.

Thallgeea Shihadeh, a 26-year-old Palestinian American who works as a nurse and teacher, remembers a different version of school in Palestine—a time before classrooms were forced into bomb shelters and kids forced into adults.

She recounts the excitement of singing the Palestinian anthem and reciting Surat Al-Fatiha every morning. Seemingly mundane sources of joy—sports practices, early dismissals from school, and poem recitations—characterize her formative memories. Threats of hunger, safety, and political instability loomed, yet state tests and college applications consumed Shihadeh’s worries.

Now, as the Gaza Strip is bombarded, her memories bear no resemblance to her current reality. The region, once home to 2.3 million people—including 635,000 students eager to start the school year—is now a graveyard of schools and playgrounds reduced to rubble.

Since October 7th, organizations like the Education Cluster Assessment Team (ECAT) have been tracking reports of damage to schools from intense Israeli military assaults. Through their “Satellite-derived Damage Assessments,” ECAT documented that 85% of schools in Gaza have sustained varying damages, and 67% are completely destroyed.

The war on Gaza has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, 16,456 of them children. Children who should have been starting their first day of school are instead making their fifth and sixth round trips to fill up buckets of water for displaced relatives. Among their peers killed, 11,947 were under 18, some so young they had yet to be named.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres condemned Israeli strikes on schools as “egregious violations of international humanitarian law.” Israel’s relentless, indiscriminate bombing of children and schools suggests an underlying narrative: all Palestinians are combatants.

Amid the bombardment, Shihadeh views the pursuit of education as an act of resistance. As Israel and its allies attempt to blur the line between civilian and combatant, the power of international bodies and procedures to hold Israel accountable continues to wane. Despite a precedent of international negligence, Palestinians have seized the power of education to assert their humanity, preserve their culture, and resist erasure under Israel’s siege on Palestine.

The Limits of International Accountability

The first document to recognize education as a fundamental right for all, irrespective of nationality, race, or gender, was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights signed in 1948. The UDHR was established in a world recovering from World War II and the terrors of the Holocaust.

Shortly after, the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and 1977 obliged governing powers in occupied territories to facilitate the proper working of schools. The mandate prohibited attacks on educational institutions, thereby granting them protected status.

By 1998, following atrocious wars in the Balkans and the Rwanda Genocide of 1994, the Rome Statute was adopted and would serve as the founding treaty for the International Criminal Court (ICC). The statute established the ICC’s power to prosecute individuals internationally for serious offenses such as genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. Similar to the Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute prohibited intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to education.

These frameworks, however, rely on the political will of nations to enforce them. For decades, Israel has disregarded international law with impunity. Despite evidence of systematic attacks on schools, the ICC has failed to hold Israeli officials accountable. Legal scholars like Alan Dershowitz argue that the ICC lacks jurisdiction over Israel, as it is not a party to the Rome Statute. Others counter that Palestine’s 2015 accession to the ICC grants the court jurisdiction over crimes committed in Palestinian territories.

The reality is bleaker. Even if the ICC conducts its own investigations into alleged violations, the UN Security Council—dominated by veto-wielding powers like the United States—can block referrals. The U.S. has vetoed 45 resolutions critical of Israel since 1945, shielding it from accountability.

Children as Combatants: The Rejection of Palestinian Humanity

These legal frameworks, designed to protect civilian life and liberties, collapse under the weight of deliberate mischaracterization and dehumanization. In this twisted narrative, the protected status of schools is weaponized; claims of schools turned military bases are justified by the infiltration of two-foot, pacifier-sucking “terrorists” who are deemed threats before they can crawl.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) has on numerous occasions accused schools of being “used by Hamas terrorists” to launch attacks against IDF troops and the state of Israel. These accusations have been unequivocally disproved by organizations like the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Far too many casualties later, the agency confirmed that the teachers were simply educators.

As a result, historically protected spaces like schools and hospitals have become theaters of war, and the international community has become a spectator.

Dehumanization extends beyond schools. In an interview on October 29, former IDF intelligence officer Eliyahu Yossian stated that “there are no innocents in Gaza—there are combatants and their families.” He called for “mountains of corpses” and “zero restraint in the assault on Gaza.” When Eylon Levy, former spokesperson for Israel, was asked if he supports the release of innocent Palestinian children, he responded, “I do not support the release of terrorists.” UNICEF designated Gaza the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.

But Israel is not alone in this dehumanization.

When the walls of our own Yale residential halls are defiled with the words “Death to Palestine,” “children of whores,” and “they are subhuman” in Hebrew, and our university defends it as “political sentiment,” we are forced to confront an unsettling truth: the dehumanization of Palestinians is not confined to Israel—it thrives here, in our educational institutions, in our communities. This is not an anomaly; it is the sickening status quo.

Such legal and psychological violence erodes the power of institutional accountability. Palestinian humanity is mocked when entire lineages are erased, and thousands of kids huddle in the basements of crumbling hospital buildings, bracing for the next bomb to drop. It is mocked when seven-year-olds die in refugee camps torn apart by explosions, only to be thrown in cells alongside their fathers before the age of eight. It is mocked when classes are held in cemeteries.

How can we expect international treaties to protect these spaces when we refuse to distinguish between a combatant and a civilian, a kid and an adult, a toy and a weapon?

We can’t.

What’s scariest to the Israeli occupation about a child holding a single-digit number in Gaza is not that they will join Hamas; it’s that they will follow up on their promise to rebuild every destroyed school building, to resurrect every massacred hospital, and to restore the dignity of the next generation of Palestinians who resist the occupation’s attempt to erase their national identity and their right to self-determination. Thaljreen Shihadeh is an embodiment of this promise—to rebuild, reclaim, and resist erasure.

Writer’s Reflection:

Upon hearing that Gaza, a land historically battered by corruption and instability, champions one of the highest literacy levels in the world, I initially set out to write this piece on a more hopeful note. I knew this was a testament to the resilient spirit and ingenuity of the Palestinian people—a priority that countries enduring far milder crises rarely achieve, let alone sustain. My optimism quickly waned as I was forced to confront that the reality on the ground reflected a brutal and complete annihilation of this very source of pride. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, and the happy ending I once sought was impossible.