Over 41,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israel’s U.S.-supplied bombs, missiles, tanks, and assassins in the over 11 months since October 7, 2023. Over 15,000 of the dead are children. The UN estimates that at least 19,000 of the children who have survived are orphans, or have lost touch with their parents and families. Most of the orphans must fend for themselves, seeking food and shelter in the most desperate conditions on the streets of bombed out Gaza.

As the school year starts around the world, schools might have provided a relatively safe space for Gaza’s 625,000 school-age children. There would be a place for each of them to learn, to be together, to play sports, and make friends. But while students in the United States start grade school, high school, or college this fall, the United States government, the Biden-Harris administration, made sure that there would be no schools for those children to go to in Gaza. They did that by stopping funding for UNRWA, the United Nations relief agency that would have been running 300 schools there.

Israel’s “Systemic Obliteration” of Gaza’s Educational System

Most of Gaza’s 560 schools have been damaged or destroyed by Israel’s USA-supplied bombs. Those bombs have killed hundreds of aid workers including teachers, school administrators, and 15,000 children. 

UN experts have called this the “systemic obliteration” of the academic system in Gaza. 

And Israel’s depraved war crime of targeting schools, their staff, children, and refugees sheltering in them, is ongoing. On September 12, Israel bombed a UN school sheltering displaced people in central Gaza, killing at least 18 people, including the shelter manager and five other UNRWA staff. That brought the total number of UNRWA staff killed in Gaza since October 7 to 220.

Before Israel’s bombs destroyed the educational system in Gaza, students in UNRWA schools got a secular (non-religious) education. The core of the curriculum included “human rights, tolerance, equality and non-discrimination with regard to race, gender, language and religion, throughout the teaching and learning processes,” and acknowledging “the Palestinian heritage and culture of the students.”

Under incredibly difficult conditions, operating in a pre-October 7 situation in Gaza that was already a massive outdoor prison, UNRWA schools produced students who did remarkably well in math, language arts, history, and science. Some of them went on to colleges and universities in the region, and elsewhere in the world.

Israel Declares War on UNRWA, Biden Strangles It

Israel seized on Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel—which included the war crimes of taking hostages and the murder of civilians—to attempt to deal with what Israel’s rulers see as an existential threat. That is: in the area now ruled by Israel (the state of Israel and territory it occupies), Jews are, or soon will be a minority. Israel’s objective in the current genocidal assault on Gaza, and increasingly in the West Bank, is to reduce the Palestinians to such a state that they can no longer pose any threat to Israel’s existence as an apartheid, Jewish-supremacist state.

It was in that context that on January 18, three-and-a-half months after Hamas’s October 7 raid on Israel, Israel claimed that it had discovered that 12 UNRWA employees participated in the October 7 attack. Twelve! Out of 13,000 UNRWA employees in Gaza. And Israel made this claim without presenting any evidence. 

UNRWA immediately suspended all of the still living employees on Israel’s list while it conducted an investigation. It later concluded that a handful of the accused might have participated in the October 7 raid and fired them.

The “moral credibility” of the United States in the world is tattered and torn. That is all the more the case now, with its unbroken record of enabling and defending Israel’s genocidal crimes against the people of Gaza. But Israel’s “moral credibility” is less than zero. Israel alone could not have convinced the major Western imperialist powers to cut off funding for UNRWA based on slanderous claims that UNRWA is basically a Hamas front group.

But when Biden announced that the U.S. was buying Israel’s story and cutting off funds to UNRWA, other major donors did the same. Japan, Australia, Germany, and the UK cut off funding, critically crippling UNRWA’s ability to function in Gaza. Most of those countries have since concluded that the charges were unproven and resumed funding UNRWA, but the damage is done.

In a May 30 op-ed in the NY Times titled UNRWA: Stop Israel’s Violent Campaign Against Us, Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner general of UNRWA, described the state of UNRWA schools:

UNRWA-run schools have been demolished; some 450 displaced people have been killed while sheltered inside UNRWA schools and other structures. Since Oct. 7, Israeli security forces have rounded up UNRWA personnel in Gaza, who have alleged torture and mistreatment while in detention in the Strip and in Israel.

When Biden cut off UNRWA funding, in addition to heartlessly and sadistically depriving children in Gaza of an education, he sent a message that Israel had a green light to continue to target UNRWA.

In March, Congress passed a law mandating a one-year ban on UNRWA, so that Biden (or now Harris) could not reverse it. Biden signed that bill. Harris supported it.¹

What Is UNRWA and Why Does Israel Hate It, Slander It, and Target It?

UNRWA was established by the United Nations in the wake of the Nakba in 1948, when Israel drove 750,000 Palestinian people from their homes into exile in neighboring, but hostile reactionary Arab states (including Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria). In this volatile situation, when Western imperialist powers were deeply invested in propping up those reactionary regimes and stabilizing Israel, they had the UN set up UNRWA. UNRWA was charged with providing minimal educational, survival, and legal IDs for Palestinian refugees.

A senior UN official explained how Western imperialist powers view UNRWA today. He told a New York Times Magazine reporter² that UNRWA “works to the extent that it can work and keeps the lid on things in Palestine. It just keeps the pressure down by providing services, offering jobs, putting money in the economy...”

But the continued existence of UNRWA, and, with it the recognition that the Palestinian people are refugees driven from their homeland, is viewed as an existential threat by the Israeli government. A former member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, representing the so-called “leftist” Labor Party, told the New York Times Magazine reporter, “UNRWA needs to go, because UNRWA is the flaming sword that hangs above the Jewish state.” And he said, “Close it, defund it, in order to send a message to Palestinians that the war of 1948 [i.e., the Nakba, Israel’s terrorist ethnic cleansing of Palestine] is long over, the state of Israel is here to stay, and they need to move on.”

In defunding UNRWA’s work in Gaza, including running the public school system, Biden gave backing to that.

What Are We Gonna Do Now?

At the very time that educational institutions in Gaza, serving those among the most oppressed and dehumanized children, are being bombed, people in them murdered, and defunded, students in this country who stand up, tell the truth, and protest are threatened with expulsion and brutalized by police. Faculty who speak out are targeted, threatened, and even fired. Administrators of the most influential universities—which are institutions serving the ruling class—are especially going after anyone who dares to tell the truth about the racist Jewish-supremacist nature of Zionism.

So, what are we gonna do now?

We live in the country that is arming, funding, and covering up Israel’s genocide in Gaza. We have a responsibility to STOP this genocide. The struggle that erupted last year across college campuses and beyond must not cave in to censorship, blacklisting, academic suspensions, and brutal police repression. If students cannot go to school in Gaza because of “our” government, we have to do everything in our power to not back down but intensify and spread opposition to Israel's genocide and U.S. backing for it.

But even more, we have to dig into the causes of this horror and how the struggle to end the genocide relates to getting rid of the system that has caused it—capitalism-imperialism. These essential social media dispatches from Bob Avakian shine a light on those causes, speak to key issues that have arisen within this movement, and lay out how a revolution against U.S. imperialism could actually be made in this time, not in some far-off distant time.