‘Scholasticide is evidence of genocidal acts’: Gaza report

A new report published by Friends of Palestinian Universities concludes that since October 2023 Israel has carried out “systematic destruction of Gaza’s higher education sector”.

It adds that this represents a “constitutive dimension of the genocide identified by the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the International Association of Genocide Scholars and leading international human rights organisations, in the context of ongoing proceedings before the International Court of Justice and provisional measures issued by the court”.

The report, Scholasticide in Gaza: The Systematic Destruction of Palestinian Higher Education and the Continuation of Collective Resilience, was written by a collective of academics who combined qualitative fieldwork, quantitative analysis, documentary analysis and historical-legal inquiry.

It has drawn upon collaborations between researchers in Gaza and international partners, coordinated through the University of Bristol and Friends of Palestinian Universities, with ethical approval granted by the University of Bristol School of Education Research Ethics Committee in July 2025.

In the foreword, Professor Karma Nabulsi, senior research fellow, St Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford, said the report offers a much-needed resource and record of higher education, notably in Palestine. It describes the devastation suffered, defines its impact and lays out practical ways to address it.

It also uses new vocabulary “intended to reflect the magnitude and dimensions of what the Palestinians now face”. This included the term “collective resilience”, reflecting the “vast repertoire used by people when confronting, enduring and overcoming a genocide”; and “scholasticide” as “the definition and explanation of total destruction recently inflicted on Palestine education”.

The report describes “scholasticide” as an assault on Palestinian institutions, infrastructure, personnel, archives and intellectual and cultural life through which Palestinian society reproduces itself across generations.

“Scholasticide is not collateral damage. It is a deliberate strategy of systematic annihilation and erasure of education intrinsic to genocide rather than incidental to it,” the report says.

It says Gaza’s entire higher education system has faced “near-total destruction” since October 2023, when Israel launched military operations in Gaza in response to the 7 October attacks on Israel, which involved mass killing of civilians and seizure of hostages by Palestinian armed groups from Gaza.

“All 19 recognised institutions have been systematically targeted: every one of Gaza’s university campuses has been severely damaged or completely destroyed, while university colleges and intermediate colleges have sustained severe damage rendering them non-operational,” it notes.

UNESCO’s 2025 needs assessment, conducted in partnership with the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education and the Arab World for Research and Development, documented damage across 38 campuses, with 22 campuses completely destroyed and 14 sustaining different levels of damage, it says.

“Of 206 buildings assessed, 195 were destroyed or severely damaged.”

UNESCO estimated total physical damage to Gaza’s higher education infrastructure at US$373 million. The April 2026 Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment by the World Bank, the European Union and the United Nations estimated total damages across Gaza’s entire education sector at $1.08 billion, with total recovery and reconstruction needs at US$4.71 billion, it notes, adding that these estimates are recognised to be conservative.

The human cost was that more than 1,372 university students and more than 246 academics and university staff, including archivists, had been killed since October 2023.

Among them were three university presidents, including Professor Sufyan Tayeh and Professor Muhammad Eid Shabir of the Islamic University of Gaza and Professor Said Al-Zibda of the University College of Applied Sciences, as well as nine college deans.

“Many of Gaza’s leading academics, such as Professor Refaat Alareer, have been assassinated together with members of their families in targeted Israeli strikes on their homes,” the report says.

“Gaza’s academic community has suffered mass displacement, injury, imprisonment and the destruction of the material conditions required for teaching, research and professional formation”.

‘Evidence’ of genocidal acts

The report claims to demonstrate through legal arguments that the destruction of Gaza’s higher education and cultural infrastructure “provides direct evidence of three of the five genocidal acts enumerated in Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention”.

The report says: “The systematic and comprehensive nature of scholasticide, alongside the parallel destruction of cultural and religious sites, archives and libraries, supplies compelling evidence of the special intent required to establish genocide along all three of the evidentiary lines recognised in international law: direct statements, pattern of conduct and the targeted destruction of cultural and educational property.

“Scholasticide stands at the intersection of an unlawful occupation, a system of apartheid, an unlawful siege on Gaza and ultimately a genocide.”

The report calls on UNESCO to “formally recognise scholasticide as a violation of international law and a dimension of genocide, activate cultural heritage emergency mechanisms and establish a permanent international monitoring mechanism for scholasticide reporting to the UN General Assembly”.

Academics show ‘collective resilience’

Despite the scale of destruction imposed on them, Gaza’s academic community has responded with “extraordinary collective resilience at every level”, the report says.

“For most of the duration of the genocide, teaching and research have been sustained by the determined efforts of faculty, students and staff.”

Nabulsi said in the words of Palestinian public university presidents that “our universities live on, refusing erasure”, despite every recognised higher education institution in Gaza being targeted.

In May 2024, academics and administrators from Gaza’s universities issued an open statement to the international academic community, affirming their determination to sustain their institutions and rejecting externally driven schemes for the reconstruction or replacement of Gaza’s universities.

Out of this civic mobilisation, the presidents of Gaza’s three non-profit universities established by formal mandate, the Emergency Committee of Universities in Gaza (ECUG), which serves as the collective representative body of the sector.

The ECUG, in partnership with the Taawon (Welfare Association) and the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education, established the ISNAD programme as a financial lifeline for Gaza’s tuition-dependent institutions, supporting tens of thousands of students, the report notes.

Other initiatives include international support from the PalMed Gaza Educate Medics programme, the UNESCO Gaza Virtual Campus and emerging national consortia of partnerships in Norway and the United Kingdom.

Nabulsi said: “In spite of the killing of thousands of university students, university academics and staff – including university presidents, deans, archivists and prominent scholars – this report shows clearly that their continued resilience offers everyone the means to extend the most practical solidarity.”

International response ‘too small’

However, the Friends of Palestine Universities report laments the “disproportionately small” international response relative to the scale of destruction and says that while the international academy has issued an unprecedented sequence of resolutions, boycotts and statements, “most universities in the Global North have not yet translated this normative shift into direct institutional partnership with Gaza’s universities”.

This contrasted with the “order of magnitude greater commitment” to supporting higher education in Ukraine following Russia’s full-scale invasion.

The report urges universities and academic institutions to establish formal partnerships with Gaza's institutions and provide material support for research and teaching collaborations and “refuse to participate in initiatives that bypass them”.

It calls on aid agencies to end the exclusion of higher education from humanitarian frameworks and reform aid practices and provide material support for the rehabilitation and reconstruction of the sector.

Governments are called on to support funding Gaza’s universities directly and guarantee mobility pathways for Palestinian scholars.

The report calls on the European Union to create a dedicated funding window, ensure Palestinian participation in Horizon Europe and Erasmus+ and condition research funding on compliance with international law.

But the report also warns that sustainable reconstruction and development of the higher education sector in Gaza cannot be achieved “for” Palestinians but only “with and through” their own national higher education institutions.

“Palestinian sector leadership and ownership, anchored in the Emergency Committee of Universities in Gaza and grounded in the principles of self-determination and liberation, must be the central principle guiding all engagement with the sector,” it says.

You can read about how Gaza’s higher education is surviving in tents here.