Why Israel is Committing “scholasticide” Against UNRWA Schools
The UN agency’s education programme is impeding the Zionist objective of forced relocation of the Palestinian population.
This week the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it struck a “Hamas war room” embedded inside a school operated by UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees. The school was located in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, and was part of a larger residential complex. Both the school and the residential building were being used to shelter around 100 refugees from nearby Rafah.
Abu Abdaullah Zuhair Abu Rahma, an employee of the UNRWA facility that was hit, described the attack:
“It happened around 2:05 a.m. in a place sheltering displaced people. They came to the school to be safe, and the school was hit without any warning. One of the school’s staff members was martyred, and it seems that there is no safe place in the Gaza Strip.”
The local hospital said it received 36 dead bodies following the strike, including several children.
Abu Mohammed, a survivor of the strike, told reporters:
“This is madness. They are targeting people, civilians. They have nothing to do with the resistance or with anything. They are children. I swear to God, they are children. She is the friend of my girl. They play together each day.”
Israel claimed that “more than 10” of the bombing victims belonged to Hamas, though it didn’t offer details about the identities of the others. No names or identities of the alleged “Hamas commanders” killed in the strike have been released by the IDF.
UNRWA schools have been especially targeted by the IDF
It is difficult to understand why Hamas would have a “war room” or “command center” anywhere above ground, let alone in a school — especially since we know that the IDF has been specifically targeting UNRWA schools all throughout Gaza and since October they have have destroyed over 200 schools, killing almost 200 UNRWA staffers.
The UN actually published a report last month complaining about the IDF’s “systematic obliteration” of the UNRWA education system.
UN: Israel is committing “scholasticide”
As of April 2024, over 5,800 students and teachers have been killed and a further 8,575 have been injured across Gaza’s school system, according to the UN:
“With more than 80 per cent of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed, it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’,” the experts said.
Moreover, Israel has — until now — failed to even offer a perfunctory reason for the targeted strikes. The Israelis seem to feel they can simply rely on their decades-long assertions that UNRWA is a “hotbed” of Hamas activity, and their accusations have been debunked in recent months.
In fact, many countries that had suspended their funding of UNRWA had recently reversed their decision. Money was starting to flow back into the UN agency. This may have been the proximate reason for a panicking Israel to issue their report about the Hamas “war room” in a UNRWA school this week.
However, the fact that IDF is deliberately targeting the UNRWA school system is key to understanding Israel’s determination to eradicate UNRWA.
Why Israel hates UNRWA
Israel really, REALLY hates UNRWA. They — and their US allies — have been trying for decades to have the agency shut down and the plight of the Palestinians transferred to the UNHCR agency.
The reason is that UNRWA is a specialised agency, whose full name is The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. It has a “single mission mandate” that is specific to the Palestinian people, which it has been doing since 1948.
In fact, the existence of UNRWA is a constant reminder of the existence of the Palestinian people themselves.
Israel wants UNRWA to be dismantled and the Palestinians turned over to the tender mercies of The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which is an umbrella refugee agency that has no special mandate for Palestine.
UNHCR specialises in “resettlement” of refugees in third countries, whereas UNRWA concentrates on sustaining the Palestinian refugees pending the resolution of a Palestinian State.
Emmanuel Navon, an Israeli political scientist writing in The Times of Israel, expresses the official Zionist position vis-a-vis Palestinians: “some 95% of ‘Palestinian refugees’ are not considered refugees under the UNHCR definition”.
A bulwark against genocide
UNRWA was originally formed as a result of the Nakba, the massive and violent ethnic cleansing campaign carried out by the Zionist Israelis against the indigenous population.
This sets UNRWA apart from UNHCR, which handles the resettlement of people made refugees due to armed conflict. The Palestinians were not displaced by “war”, but rather by a deliberate attempt by another group to erase not just their lives, but their culture and their collective memory.
This means, for Israel, that UNRWA is a constant reminder of the Zionists’ “original sin” of ethnic cleansing, when they stole the land from the Palestinians in 1948 and created 750,000 refugees.
A strategic imperative
Israel thus sees it as a strategic necessity that the Palestinians are no longer considered to be “refugees”, and that they be simply moved out to other Arab countries in the region.
In fact, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, was “trying to do away with [UNRWA]”, while serving in the White House, according to Foreign Policy :
“His initiative is part of a broader push by the Trump administration and its allies in Congress to strip these Palestinians of their refugee status in the region and take their issue off the table in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, according to both American and Palestinian officials.”
The Israeli motives are simple: such a change would make their “Palestinian problem” go away, while ensuring that their planned campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing would be supported, strengthened and even enhanced through official United Nations and international imprimaturs.
Netanyahu’s coalition demands the death of UNRWA
The pressure on Netanyahu to eliminate UNRWA has only increased with the ascendance of the far right settler forces that enable his ruling coalition:
While tensions have characterised Israel’s relationship with the agency since its 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli government’s recent shift to the far right has seen new demands that the agency be disbanded completely. The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, made such calls himself in 2017 and 2018, long before the current war.
On January 4, a debate in the Israeli Knesset heard arguments for the agency to be “destroyed”.
Radical Zionist settlers are attacking UNRWA directly
It is a well-established fact that the Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are extremely radical Zionists who are prone to violence against Palestinians.
In fact, the outrageous nature of settler violence has prompted President Biden to issue sanctions against some settler groups.
But these settlers also know that UNRWA is an obstacle to realising the Zionist dream of Eretz-Israel. That is why in early May 2024 a group of settlers set fire to the UNRWA HQ in East Jerusalem, forcing the UN agency to shut down operations there.
Why Israel is targeting the schools
Prior to October 7, 2023, UNRWA operated a total of 700 schools in the Gaza Strip.
Indeed, UNRWA spends over half its budget on Education. In fact, Education and Healthcare are the two largest components of UNRWA’s budget.
UNRWA’s spending on education is what makes it so different from UNHCR, the agency Israel wants to see take over the Palestinian problem.
In fact, UNHCR only spends less than 6% of its budget on Education.
For Israel it is clear: if they can remove UNRWA’s educational system built up literally over generations, then that will destroy the agency, and remove a primary argument for continuing its existence.
UNRWA’s well-funded focus on ongoing cultural and educational initiatives makes the agency unique, but it also makes their schools a “prime target” for the IDF.
Reject Israeli propaganda; defend UNRWA
If Hamas really did decide to set up their war room above ground in an UNRWA school which they knew was being “systematically” targeted by Israel, and if they put a bunch of their (unnamed) “commanders” in it, when they have such extensive and secure facilities 60m below ground and out of the reach of Israeli bombs, then I guess those guys get this year’s “Darwin award”.
It is almost certain that this was not the case, and the IDF are lying — once again.
We must support UNRWA and its schools. The education and socialisation of Palestinian youth are the foundation of Palestinian culture and must be defended if Palestine is to survive.
#End
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By know the governments in the "west" know this, and they by now equally behind this evil doing. Its a repeat of that they all collaborated to do to the Yemini some years ago. Mass death, and every dirty trick in the book.