Dr. Nadia Naser-Najjab, University of Exeter

From the British Mandate to the Palestinian Nakba to the occupation of 1967, Palestinian education has been treated as a threat to be contained. The British authorities subjected Palestinian education to constant scrutiny throughout the Mandate, and British troops repeatedly opened fire on students near schools. What is unfolding in Palestine today is not an exception but the continuation of a century-long project to control Palestinian knowledge, consistent with a broader colonial application of ‘logic of elimination’ policies and practices that seek to break native resistance. Across historical Palestine, students, teachers, and institutions face challenges of extraordinary scale, shaped by systematic attacks, fragmentation, censorship, and destruction. But nowhere is the situation more dire than in Gaza, subjected to a genocide since October 2023.

Education Under Attack

78 years ago, on 15 May 1948, in addition to destruction of entire villages and the forced expulsion of about 750,000 Palestinians, Zionist militias looted an estimated 70,000 Palestinian books, and later Israeli military orders banned textbooks, censored teaching, and criminalised Palestinian narratives. Palestinians who remained faced the General Security Service, operating from the prime minister’s office, which could dismiss teachers without explanation and bar them from all educational work. Israeli archives even record officials discussing the need to keep Palestinians “half educated” while preparing for future “transfer.”

The systemic erasure continues now in different ways. In April 2024, Professor Nadera Shalhoub‑Kevorkian, a leading feminist scholar at the Hebrew University, was detained and interrogated over podcast remarks and her academic research, accused of incitement. Since October 2023, Gaza’s education system has been devastated on an unprecedented scale. UN experts described the situation as scholasticide, defined as “the systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure.”

Between October 2023 and April 2024 alone, more than 5,479 students and 261 teachers were killed, and every school in the Strip was damaged or destroyed. All of Gaza’s 18 institutions of higher education have been destroyed or damaged, including their libraries, denying more than 90,000 students access to education. None of this is hidden. The Israeli army itself circulated footage of its forces blowing up Al‑Israa University, and a soldier posed in front of burning books in the Islamic University’s central library. Prominent academics have been killed, including Professor Sufyan Tayeh, among the top 2% of global researchers, and Professor Refaat Alareer, whose teaching shaped a generation of writers. In 2025, Dr. Omar Harb died of malnutrition, under total blockade after losing 26 family members.

In the West Bank, schools face a different but equally deliberate form of violence. Military raids, settler attacks, and movement restrictions have turned learning into an act of endurance. In 2024–25 alone, more than 2,000 education-related incidents were recorded, affecting over 540 schools. In Israel-controlled Area C, settler harassment has produced high dropout rates, especially among girls. On 6 January 2026, Israeli forces raided Birzeit University during working hours, breaking through the main gate, entering buildings, and firing live ammunition, tear gas, and stun grenades as thousands were on campus. More than 40 people were injured.

In East Jerusalem, the assault takes the form of curricular control. After the Trump administration moved the US embassy to Jerusalem in 2018, Israel launched a five-year plan to expand classrooms and extracurricular programmes, but only for schools adopting the Israeli curriculum. In July 2022, six East Jerusalem schools were punished for allegedly “inciting” against the state. New laws now bar Palestinians who studied in West Bank universities from teaching in Jerusalem schools, deepening teacher shortages and further marginalising Palestinian children.

Palestinian education for refugees is also targeted. Israel’s 2024 law banning UNRWA from operating in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem strikes at the heart of refugee identity. UNRWA schools have long been spaces where Palestinian history, rights, and the principle of return are taught and preserved. The agency warns the ban “will deprive over 650,000 girls and boys … from education, putting at risk an entire generation.”

Education as Resistance

Despite everything, Palestinians rebuild. In Gaza, makeshift universities have reopened in displacement zones. Students study using lecture recordings saved from the pandemic. In the West Bank, universities offer online courses to displaced Gazans. International networks, including ActforPal, are creating scholarships, mentorships, and virtual visiting-scholar programmes that offer Palestinians a vital source of hope.

As noted by Dr. Hassan El Nabih, a Palestinian educator and researcher from the destroyed Islamic University of Gaza, where 63 percent of the students are women, “Optimism is a source of resilience.” He recalls earlier wars when collective efforts restored education, and he points to the solidarity networks now helping students continue their studies, whether through online materials, scholarships abroad, or improvised learning spaces. Schoolchildren study in tents or in the open. In the West Bank, they navigate checkpoints, settler roads, and fragmentation to reach their classrooms, or create alternatives when they cannot.

More recently and amid the landscape of destruction in Gaza, a remarkable act of grassroots resistance emerged. On 21 April 2026, in Gaza City’s devastated Rimal neighbourhood, the Phoenix Library (Maktabat al-Anqa’) opened its doors, the first library to appear since the war began. Its founders, Omar Hamad, who had been displaced thirteen times, and Ibrahim Massri, began by salvaging books from the ruins of bombed homes and shattered public libraries. What started as an improvised rescue mission has grown into a collective effort to preserve knowledge, memory, and cultural continuity. The Phoenix Library has grown to more than 6,000 books across diverse fields, in both Arabic and English. Even under siege and amid ongoing war, donations keep coming, many given in honour of martyrs.

This is sumud (steadfastness) expressed through literacy, cultural continuity, and the refusal to surrender intellectual life. The library challenges the attempted erasure of Palestinian knowledge by creating a space where learning persists even as formal institutions are destroyed. The assault on Palestinian education is an assault on narrative, identity, and future. Yet Palestinians continue to rebuild, reimagine, and insist on a better horizon. Education remains not only a right but a form of resistance, a way of asserting that a people’s intellectual life will endure, even in the face of systematic attempts to extinguish it.

Image credit: “Education Under Threat: An EU-funded Palestinian school at risk of destruction” by EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0