The Destruction of Gaza is a Political Choice: From Mustafa Hafez to Today’s Charred Classrooms
By Ghada Ageel
Israel may destroy Palestinian schools and buildings, but it will not erase Palestinian rights and memory, our stories, or our right to be free.
Rescuers and medics reported that many of the children pulled from the school were so charred as to be unrecognisable, even to family members. 16 Palestinians, including many children and infants, were killed, some burnt alive. Family members used shreds of clothing to identify the children. Their names are now added to the UNICEF casualty list of over 17,000 dead children. Israel says Hamas militants were using the school as a base. No person with a conscience believes them.
After the Israeli bombs hit, the children who had been trapped by the fires died, unable to get to safety, as fire spread rapidly through the classrooms. The next morning, a news report showed lost children wandering through the wreckage—some searching for belongings to salvage, others collecting the flesh of their friends. One survivor told a reporter that her niece, along with her six children and husband, were burned to death in the attack.
In many ways, the school is a metaphor for the Gaza Strip as a whole – often called the largest open-air prison in the world- those trapped inside have no way to escape from the ferocious attacks. It was the second time in less than a year that this school was attacked, killing innocent displaced families with their children.
The school was named Mustafa Hafez School in Gaza City – the home of my first ever teaching assignment. I last visited in the summer of 2023, during my annual trip to Gaza. I sat with my friend Sahar, a teacher still working there. We reminisced about our early days, walking past the colorful mural painted on the school’s outer wall—the one that faced the playground where we used to train the girls’ scout and music team, who used to perform and sing in honor of Gaza’s most prominent guests.
Today, that mural is covered in blood. The school walls that once bore vibrant murals of hope and learning are now scorched and crumbling. Tattered clothes hang from blackened rafters. A child’s burnt shoe lies beside a broken fan. Blood pools on the ground where children once played. All of this brutality forms part of a long pattern of violence against schools and civilians.
One of the dangerous errors perpetuated by defenders of Israel’s genocide is to believe that history began on October 7, 2023. In reality, the history/roots of violence and dispossession stretch much further back—to the era of British colonial rule, and the subsequent Zionist settler-colonial project imposed on Palestine.
One example is the story of Mustafa Hafez, a prominent Egyptian officer who organized and directed Palestinian fedayeen (guerrilla fighters) operations against Israeli occupation in the early 1950s. Exactly 69 years ago this month, in July 1956, Hafez was assassinated by Israel’s Mossad through a booby-trapped book— a symbolic and calculated crime to eliminate Arab figures connected to Palestinian resistance. After the attack, Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan held a lavish garden party to celebrate Hafez’s assassination.
This was not just the elimination of a man; it was an attack on a narrative of rights, an effort to silence resistance at its intellectual and strategic roots. Israel has long followed a logic that believes that by killing leaders, thinkers, and allies of Palestinian liberation, it can kill the very impulse for freedom and the idea to live free. But this strategy has failed. In Palestinian collective memory, Hafez lives on as a martyr and hero. Schools, streets, and institutions across Gaza, including the one now lying in ruins, were named in his honor—a living testament to the fact that memory and rights cannot be bombed into oblivion.
Israel’s attacks on educational institutions and centers of knowledge production are deliberate. It is a policy that has persisted since the day I opened my eyes to military occupation – decades before Hamas existed, and long before October 7.
After Israel shut down all of Gaza’s universities in 1987 as part of its collective punishment policies, the only path left for continuing my education was a teacher training college administered by the so-called Israeli “civil administration.” Mustafa Hafez School became my first teaching post. I taught math and science to children aged 7 to 12 in the heart of Rimal—Gaza’s most vibrant neighborhood—once full of learning centers, including AMIDEAST and the British Council, bookshops, dozens of UN schools and community spaces, women’s embroidery collectives, and the cultural lifeblood of a people refusing to give up.
During my own schooling, attacks on schools, the attack, arrest, and torture of students and teachers, and the closure of educational institutions were the norm. Throughout my elementary and high school years, education was under siege. My generation—and over 100,000 Palestinian students—were denied the right to attend university for more than seven consecutive years when Israel shut down all of Gaza’s universities between 1987 and 1994.
For Israel, targeting schools is not a deviation from policy during wartime—it is the policy.
Likewise, the announcement by Israel’s Defense Minister that the population of Gaza will be forced to live in a small area beside Rafah is also a matter of policy. Now the guards are rounding up all the prisoners of the world’s largest open-air prison and placing them in one cell. This announcement comes as we mark thirty years since the genocide of Bosnia, when thousands were rounded up in the “Death March” before being executed.
After each genocide, the world says, “never again”. Except with Gaza instead of decrying the horrors, the western governments rush to supply Israel with more weapons—justified by the false claim of self-defence. But as Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, has made clear: “Israel has no right to defend itself against the people it occupies.” That is not opinion—it is international law.
This horror is not unfolding in a vacuum. It is enabled by American and Western weapons, funding, silence, complicity, and impunity. And what has Israel done with that impunity? It has flattened hospitals, starved civilians, dropped 2,000-pound bombs on refugee camps, and burned children alive. Now, with Gaza in ruins and the bank of civilian targets exhausted, it strikes the same infrastructure again—schools, hospitals, clinics, and community halls—the very places where it directs civilians to seek safety.
I think of the Mustafa Hafez School often. Of the chalkboards, the laughter, the murals. I think of the students I taught—now possibly among the dead or displaced. I mourn for them, but I also write for them. Because the struggle to preserve education is also the struggle to preserve life, dignity, and future.
Israel may destroy Palestinian schools and buildings, but it will not erase Palestinian rights and memory, our stories, or our right to be free.
The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.
It’s more than a political choice. It is a choice of how supremacist want to exist among others in this world, but according to their desires without any consideration for the side of others. In this sense, it’s also an existential choice.