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Gaza- “Killing, ignorance and displacement,” a government official and a human rights expert agree on these three goals in their explanation of the Israeli occupation forces’ targeting of schools in Gaza stripWhich have been transformed into shelters housing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, most of whom are women and children.
In search of safety and escape from the fires of the occupation, Gazan families took refuge in schools affiliated with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).UNRWA), and public and private schools, after they were forced to flee and leave their homes repeatedly due to the war that has been going on since the seventh of October 2023.
The past few days have witnessed the occupation committing horrific massacres that have claimed the lives of dozens of martyrs and wounded, most of them women and children, by targeting schools inhabited by displaced people in Gaza City, and this was preceded by similar massacres that targeted schools in the camp. Nusayrat For refugees and east of the city Khan Younis Central and southern sector.
Bitter reality
According to documentation by the “Government Media Office” and the “International Committee to Support the Rights of the Palestinian People”, the occupation has targeted 172 shelters since the outbreak of the war, including 152 UNRWA schools, governmental and private, inhabited by displaced persons, and the number of martyrs among the displaced persons inside them has exceeded 1,040 martyrs.
Local and international estimates indicate that the war has displaced about two million Palestinians, representing 90% of the population of the small coastal strip, estimated at about 2.2 million people. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people have taken refuge in schools, which have been transformed into overcrowded and “miserable” shelters that lack basic services and are rife with diseases.
The Director General of the Government Media Office, Ismail Al-Thawabta, told Al Jazeera Net that the bitter reality of the displaced in schools, public facilities and tents, and the spread of diseases due to overcrowding and the collapse of health services, has caused the number of natural deaths to increase six times over what it was before the outbreak of the war.
He added that the past ten months of war witnessed 9,000 deaths, in addition to recording 1.8 million cases of various diseases as a result of the conditions of war and displacement.
According to the office’s documentation, the occupation deliberately destroyed 15 vital sectors, including education. Al-Thawabat explains that the occupation systematically destroyed 117 schools and universities completely, and 332 schools and universities partially, in addition to killing 500 teachers and school principals, 100 scientists, researchers and university professors, and 9,000 school and university students.
systematic policy
Salah Abdel Aati, head of the International Committee for the Defense of the Rights of the Palestinian People (Hashd), told Al Jazeera Net that the occupation committed more than 4,650 massacres against civilians during the war, most of whom were “deliberately” killed inside their homes, shelters, schools, and hospitals.
As a result of these massacres, nearly 50,000 Palestinians were martyred (about 40,000 martyrs, and 10,000 missing, most of them under the rubble), and more than 91,000 were wounded. Abdel-Ati estimates that 70% of the martyrs and wounded were children and women, including 500 medical personnel.
Among them were also 200 martyrs from UNRWA employees, 165 journalists, 600 teachers and academics, 89 civil defense personnel, 140 lawyers and human rights activists, and hundreds of martyrs from artists, writers and athletes.
Abdel Aati places the bombing of the simple displaced people who are suffering from hunger and disease inside shelters in schools, most of which are affiliated with UNRWA and protected under international law, in the context of an Israeli policy aimed at making Gaza uninhabitable. He explains that the occupation forces destroyed 85% of homes, property, civilian objects and infrastructure, including educational facilities, during the war.
Al-Thawabat agrees with him, and believes that the occupation is pursuing a “deliberate and planned plan aimed at killing and causing the greatest possible number of civilian casualties,” by focusing on targeting shelters and civilian gatherings in schools, hospital yards, and tents. He stresses that this proves—time and again—that “the entire Gaza Strip is under fire and there is no safe place there.”
According to them, Israel seeks to target and destroy schools to “create ignorance and displacement,” and is thus continuing its crime. Genocide Within a strategy that has become clear, its goal is to “destroy all means of life in Gaza,” including the education sector.
The war has deprived 800,000 male and female students of education, including 39,000 who missed the high school exams (Tawjihi) that qualify them to enroll in universities.
Political goals
In the opinion of the Director General of the Government Media Office, Israel is committing massacres and targeting all aspects of life in Gaza, including schools and hospitals, in the context of “military pressure to achieve political goals.”
To achieve this, Al-Thawabta says, the occupation uses the “civilians card” by killing and forcing them to repeatedly flee in dangerous and harsh conditions, in addition to suffocating them with a comprehensive siege, starving them and depriving them of water, “which are crimes that are rejected under international law and…International humanitarian law“.
The crimes of genocide committed by the occupation forces over the past ten months fall within a “systematic plan,” according to Al-Thawabat, whose goal is “to kill the Palestinians with rockets, shells and diseases, and to make them ignorant and displace them.”
The Government Media Office estimates the initial direct losses resulting from the destruction of all aspects of life in Gaza at approximately $33 billion so far, in addition to tens of billions of dollars in indirect losses.
The head of the International Committee to Support the Rights of the Palestinian People said, “The occupying state is committing genocide crimes with a continuous escalation, insisting on destroying and exterminating the residents of the Gaza Strip, forcibly displacing them outside it, and depriving them of their legitimate national rights.”
