By Guardian - Chandni Desai - Sat 8 Jun 2024 11.00 BST

The attack on Palestinian education, educators and cultural knowledge isn’t new, but it has reached horrifying new levels. Israel has destroyed or damaged 80% of schools in Gaza. This is scholasticide.

As Palestinians were commemorating the 76th anniversary of their ongoing forced dispossession and expulsion from their native lands, known in Arabic as the Nakba, Israeli forces bombed six United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (Unrwa) schools in Jabalia in northern Gaza, burned one in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, and destroyed three schools and burned another in the Zaytoun neighbourhood of Gaza City.

That was just the week of 15 May. According to the UN, 80% of schools have been destroyed or damaged in Gaza since 7 October 2023. This amounts to scholasticide, with the systematic destruction of Palestinian education ongoing since the Nakba. In the latest war, outlined by the international court of justice (ICJ) as plausibly genocidal, scholasticide has shifted from systematic destruction to total annihilation of education.

In the first 100 days of this war, all 12 universities in Gaza were bombed and wholly or partly destroyed. Alongside this destruction, numerous libraries, archives, publishing houses, cultural centres, activity halls, museums, bookstores, cemeteries, monuments and archival materials were turned to rubble, ruins and dust. The attack on Palestinian education and knowledge systems and destruction and looting of rare artefacts, books, manuscripts and cultural and archival materials isn’t new: it has been documented since the 1948 Nakba.

Recently, Israeli soldiers set ablaze the remaining parts of the al-Aqsa University’s library in Gaza City and photographed themselves sitting in front of the burning books. Similarly, an Israeli soldier recently filmed himself walking through the ruins of al-Azhar University, mocking scholasticide and rejoicing in the occupation’s destruction of the university. “We’re starting a new semester,” he said, adding: “It’ll start never.”

Through the physical destruction of educational and cultural infrastructure, scholasticide obliterates the means through which a group, in this instance Palestinians, can sustain and transmit their culture, knowledge, history, memory, identity and values across time and space. It is a key feature of genocide.

The custodians of that knowledge are being killed. As of April 2024, according to UN experts and the Palestinian ministry of education and higher education, Israeli military operations have killed at least 5,479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors in Gaza, alongside archivists and librarians. Observers and monitoring groups believe that some of those people may have been deliberately targeted, similar to the ways in which the Israeli government historically assassinated intellectuals and cultural figures associated with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Approximately 90,000 Palestinian university students have had their studies suspended; many will be driven to forced displacement through genocide, as Gaza has become uninhabitable. This could contribute to the group’s geographic disintegration, especially if Gazans are forcefully dispossessed to the Sinai in Egypt, despite the ICJ’s reaffirmation that Israel must immediately implement the court’s 26 January provisional measures, which include halting its military offensive in Rafah.

Scholasticide has also intensified in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where the Israeli military has often raided educational institutions, arrested or detained students, restricted the movement of students and faculty, and undermined academic freedom by university closures.

For Palestinians, educational spaces have historically functioned as important sites for learning, revolutionary struggle, cultural preservation, connection across fragmented geographies and a cornerstone for empowering society towards liberation, particularly for refugees. This is still true, as Palestinian academics and students in Gaza continue to survive despite the infrastructural collapse and loss of education workers and students.

Many displaced academics in Gaza want to remain in, or return to, their homes and lands immediately and rebuild the educational institutions that are a central pillar for their collective life and liberation, an act of sumud, or steadfastness. In a powerful recent open letter, scholars in Gaza pointed out that “the rebuilding of Gaza’s academic institutions is not just a matter of education; it is a testament to our resilience, determination, and unwavering commitment to securing a future for generations to come.”

What is urgently needed is principled solidarity with the academics and students of Gaza. As Gazan academics put it: “We built these universities from tents. And from tents, with the support of our friends, we will rebuild them once again”.

• Chandni Desai is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto who teaches in the critical studies in equity and solidarity program