Scholasticide in Gaza: Targeting Education, Memory, and Futurity

This study examines the Israeli destruction of Gaza’s education system through the conceptual frameworks of scholasticide and educide. Drawing on thematic content analysis of twenty-nine semi-structured interviews with thirteen mothers, seven boys, and nine girls displaced in Rafah camps, it documents the Israeli deliberate dismantling of educational spaces. Testimonies reveal classrooms converted into shelters, school materials repurposed for survival, and learning routines fractured by displacement. Six interrelated themes emerge, including schools transformed into camps, learning under tents, survival labour supplanting instruction, buried credentials and deferred futures, mothers acting as improvised ‘shadow schools’, and a children’s lexicon of loss in which study persists as refusal. The findings demonstrate that education is not a collateral casualty of war but a strategic target aimed at erasing intergenerational knowledge transmission. While families reconstruct fragile forms of learning as endurance, such efforts cannot replace institutional guarantees, underscoring scholasticide as an integral component of genocidal violence.