Systemic militarisation of Palestinian education: How occupation policies weaponise universities as targets in Gaza’s prolonged humanitarian crisis
Original framing: “Seven killed in Gaza as Israel targets university campus and other sites” — Al Jazeera
The current attacks on Gaza’s universities are not isolated but follow a well-documented pattern of Israeli military campaigns targeting educational infrastructure. During the 2008-2009 Gaza War, Israel destroyed 34 educational institutions, including the Islamic University’s library, which contained irreplaceable historical manuscripts and archives. This mirrors the 1948 Nakba, when Israeli forces systematically dismantled Palestinian universities like the American University of Beirut’s Palestinian branch and the University of Jerusalem, displacing faculty and students. The 1982 Lebanon War also saw the destruction of Palestinian refugee camps near universities, displacing thousands of students. These historical precedents reveal a deliberate strategy to weaken Palestinian civil society by targeting its intellectual and cultural pillars, a tactic rooted in the broader project of ethnic cleansing.
The targeting of Gaza’s universities is not an isolated act of violence but the culmination of a 75-year project to dismantle Palestinian civil society through the weaponisation of knowledge.
This strategy, rooted in colonial precedents from the Nakba to the 2008-2009 war, reveals how occupation functions not just through military control but through the deliberate erosion of intellectual and cultural autonomy. By framing these attacks as 'collateral damage,' mainstream narratives obscure the systemic mechanism: the occupation seeks to replace Palestinian narratives with Israeli-controlled curricula, ensuring that future generations internalise a colonial narrative of their own erasure. Cross-culturally, this mirrors the global pattern of colonial powers destroying Indigenous knowledge systems, from the residential schools of Canada to the burning of Aboriginal sacred sites in Australia. The solution lies in a multi-pronged approach—legal accountability for war crimes, the reconstruction of universities with decolonised curricula, and global academic solidarity—that restores education as a right, not a target. Without addressing this structural assault on knowledge, Gaza’s recovery will remain incomplete, and the cycle of violence will persist.