In 2005, a university in the United Kingdom offered me a scholarship. I never set foot on its campus. I could not leave Gaza.
The crossing through which I would have travelled had been closed for more than six months, and a locked gate does not read acceptance letters.
By the time it might have opened, the place would have belonged to someone else, to another academic year, another student, another version of my life.
I have carried that small, private loss for more than 20 years. I raise it now only because it has become the most modest possible version of something far larger: the systematic narrowing of an entire generation’s future.
The destruction of education in Gaza cannot be understood only through the number of buildings reduced to rubble.
Its defining feature is its reach across the entire learning system. Schools and universities have been damaged or destroyed.
Students, teachers and professors have been killed or displaced. Libraries, laboratories, archives and other repositories of knowledge have been erased.
United Nations experts and a growing body of academic research have described this pattern as ‘scholasticide’: the systematic destruction of education through attacks on its institutions, infrastructure, students, educators and intellectual life.
The term captures something that statistics alone cannot. What is being lost is not a collection of isolated buildings, but the foundations through which a society preserves knowledge, prepares its young people and imagines a future.
The scale is difficult to comprehend. By July 2025, 97 percent of Gaza’s schools had sustained damage.
United Nations experts reported that all 12 of Gaza’s universities had been damaged or destroyed; a later UNESCO assessment found that 95 percent of higher-education campuses had been affected, with most buildings destroyed or rendered unusable.
More than 68 million metric tons of debris now cover Gaza. Hundreds of teachers, professors and other education workers have been killed.
But the loss of a scholar cannot be measured as the loss of a building can.
It is the disappearance of decades of accumulated knowledge: the lectures never delivered, the research never completed, the students never mentored and the future teachers, doctors, engineers and writers who will never encounter that person in a classroom.
Ordinary foundations of classrooms
For Gaza’s children, education now survives largely through improvisation. Hundreds of temporary learning spaces have been assembled in tents, shelters and damaged buildings.
The word “temporary” has become misleading. For many children, these spaces are not a bridge back to school. They are the only school they know.
Picture it plainly: children sitting on the ground, with no desks or chairs; a teacher working beneath plastic sheeting, without reliable light, electricity or a proper board.
The tent is stifling in summer and vulnerable to rain and flooding in winter. At times, even the most basic tools of learning have been unavailable.
For more than two years, educational materials were prevented from entering Gaza. Not weapons. Pencils, notebooks, exercise books, crayons and rulers.
Only in January 2026 did UNICEF announce that thousands of basic learning and recreational kits had begun entering Gaza after more than two years of restrictions. Reuters news agency reported that the kits contained pencils, but textbooks were still not permitted.
Read that again. We are not debating curricula, teaching methods or class sizes. We have reached the question of whether a child may have a pencil.
A pencil should not be a subject of negotiation. Nor should a desk, a page or a roof. These are the ordinary foundations of a classroom, the things assumed to exist before a lesson begins.
In Gaza, they have become objects of longing: a child wishing for a notebook, a teacher forced to improvise without the simplest tools, the ordinary conditions of learning placed beyond reach.
Gaza is often described as a place Palestinians are desperate to escape. That framing misses something essential.
For many Palestinians I know, leaving is not the dream. The dream is to remain, to study, work, raise a family and build a future in the place they call home, without being imprisoned within it.
