With the approach of the new academic year in September 2025, in Gaza the enclave still experiences death, darkness, and blood, with the complete shortage of education, students, schools, and teachers.
Approximately 700,000 students are still bereft of education and have become displaced and deprived because of the genocide and ethnic cleansing that the Israeli occupation has been relentlessly committing against the Gaza Stip.
While schools worldwide are preparing for this new academic year, the enclave's schools have morphed into piles of charred stones and debris, sinking in a heavy silence overwhelmed by the noise of shells, missiles, and combat aircraft, rather than school bells for morning lineup.
Strikingly, Gaza had been embracing 796 schools with 785,000-plus students, but today over 80 percent of schools have turned into ruins, with 156 schools entirely decimated, while 382 schools, universities, and educational institutions have been dramatically damaged. Even UNRWA-run schools, which should have been a safe shelter, were not spared from this devastation.
The magnitude of this calamity unveils merely piles of rubble, twisted steel, and shattered concrete now standing where once rose beacons of learning and knowledge, institutions that once delivered a promise of a better future for countless young people.
Since the onset of the genocide in the Gaza Strip, more than 17,085 school students and over 1,261 college students have fallen, while upwards of 25,213 school students and 2,671 university students have been wounded, according to the latest figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education covering the period from Oct. 7, 2023, to August 2025.
Those students were dreaming of a better future, but today they remain merely numbers and statistics in the reports of hospitals and international organizations.
Prior to October 2023, the Israeli occupation had been shattering the educational sector in the Gaza enclave through weaponry and politics, but after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the matter escalated far beyond that, with the occupation forces engaging in effacing the entire educational system.
Some UN experts and international organizations have described what is happening in the enclave as an entire scholasticide, implying the deliberate targeting of the educational system's infrastructure, as well as libraries and sites of Palestinian heritage, in addition to the systematic obliteration of education by murdering and detaining teachers and students, a key episode of the entire war of annihilation Israel has been pursuing since 2023
