What is unfolding in Gaza today follows the brutal logic of colonial underdevelopment. It represents the deliberate degradation of a people's capacity for survival and self-determination through colonial techniques perfected across centuries. Beyond becoming the theater where genocide plays out in real time, Gaza has also been transformed into a laboratory where engineered famine and the co-opting of education work in concert to achieve the complete negation of Palestinian survival as a people.
The Inversion of Sustenance
In March 2025, Israel imposed a siege on Gaza that lasted 11 weeks, blocking food, medicine, fuel, and basic supplies—even stopping UN aid deliveries. The blockade exacerbated an already dire humanitarian crisis, with UNICEF reporting that at least 66 children have died from starvation since the start of the genocide and an average of 112 children receive daily treatment for malnutrition.
In response to mounting international pressure surrounding the siege, Israeli and U.S. officials developed the Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF)—a controlled aid delivery system operated by private military contractors. But instead of providing humanitarian relief, the aid distribution sites operated by the GHF have become the scene of countless massacres. Described by UN officials as "death traps" and "militarized humanitarian assistance," these sites have recorded over 600 deaths and over 4,000 injuries since May 27.
These deaths were not a series of unfortunate events but the direct results of American mercenaries and the Israeli occupation army using indiscriminate force against civilians. Recent testimony published by Haaretz reveals Israeli soldiers received direct orders to open fire on unarmed civilians queuing for aid, with soldiers describing the locations as "killing fields" during their mission—informally dubbed "Operation Salted Fish"—where they used live ammunition, grenades, and mortars against crowds seeking food.
Meanwhile, American contractors working these sites told the Associated Press their colleagues fired live ammunition "in all directions" at Palestinians seeking food, with videos capturing guards celebrating—"Hell yeah, boy!"—after shooting into crowds.
The calculated nature of this approach is what makes it particularly devastating. Starvation is being wielded not as a consequence of war, but as a weapon of war. This is not a distribution mechanism designed to provide equitable access, protect the vulnerable, or ensure population survival—it's intended to crush the will of an entire people by turning their most basic human need into a death sentence.
When seeking food becomes lethal and pits the starving against each other, entire social structures collapse, trust in collective organization disintegrates, and children develop fundamentally altered relationships with safety and community.
The normalization of extreme violence around basic survival needs rewrites the social DNA of a society, embedding generational trauma that compounds across time—destroying the cultural foundations that allow communities to function, heal, and rebuild.
Destroying Tomorrow
For the second year in a row, high school students in Gaza were unable to sit for their final exams. The Israeli genocide has not only killed more than 16,600 students and wounded over 26,000 in Gaza and the West Bank since October 7, 2023—it has also deliberately targeted education in a campaign to dismantle Gaza's intellectual and cultural foundation.
Some 280 government schools and 65 UNRWA-run schools have been destroyed—part of the nearly 90% of Gaza’s educational infrastructure that has been damaged or demolished. As a result, 630,000 students are currently deprived of their right to education.
The story is no different at the higher levels of education. These institutions once preserved national memory, stood as pillars of future reconstruction, and nurtured a culture of self-reliance under siege, producing doctors, engineers, and professionals whose education was both a necessity and a form of resistance. Today, not a single university remains standing. Every single one has been obliterated.
The humanitarian impact extends far beyond these statistics: in January 2025, UNICEF reported that over 1 million Palestinian children in Gaza are in need of mental health and psychosocial support—and will carry the trauma of this genocide for the rest of their lives.
This is nothing short of a war on Palestinian minds—coordinated violence designed to traumatize and break an entire generation of children while simultaneously destroying their educational foundations. When Israel flattens universities, burns libraries, and turns classrooms into mass graves, it is not just Gaza's infrastructure being destroyed—it is the knowledge that sustains resistance, the culture that reinforces identity, and the children who carry both forward.
Like colonial projects before it, Zionism understands that severing the next generation from its roots is essential to destroying the Palestinian cause. Burn the books, kill the teachers, dismantle the native education system—and the memory of a nation fades. This reflects Ben-Gurion's core strategy of dispossession through generational amnesia—the belief that "the old will die and the young will forget." Robbed of agency and autonomy, an uneducated people can be more easily subjugated.
This targeting of an entire educational infrastructure is a central piece of the settler colonial puzzle.
The primary objective is to ethnically cleanse Gaza entirely. The so-called "Trump Plan" that Israel is working to implement calls for the transfer of Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt, and eventually from the West Bank into Jordan—and beyond. This would effectively erase Palestinian presence, claim, and continuity on the land.
Once displaced, these refugees face two dead ends: assimilation or dependency. In assimilation, they gradually adopt a new language and culture, becoming disconnected from their cause. In dependency, those who resist assimilation remain stateless and voiceless—fed and sheltered, but stripped of agency, dignity, and political relevance.
That’s where education comes in. Whatever Palestinians remain will be "de-radicalized" through domesticated education—education stripped of its empowering and liberating potential and perverted to tame and pacify. This domestication is designed to dehumanize and disfigure Palestinian consciousness, transforming education into a psychological weapon used to alienate Palestinians from their history and culture.
Negating Palestine
The weaponization of hunger and the corruption of education are not separate crises—they are complementary tools in a comprehensive architecture of erasure. When Palestinians are forced to risk death for flour, when mothers cannot find baby formula for their infants, when children develop trauma around basic survival, the Zionist intent becomes undeniable: there is no future for Palestinians in Palestine.
When mis-education distorts reality and history, turns Palestinians against their own heritage, and strips knowledge of its radical or transformative potential, the colonial project reaches completion.
This is the logic of settler colonialism perfected—starve the body, kill the mind, break the spirit. Those who survive the genocide and the famine will be too traumatized, too uneducated, too severed from their roots to mount organized resistance.
For 77 years, through an ongoing Nakba that continues to this day, the Palestinian cause has endured massacres, imprisonment, and exile—and grown more stubborn with each effort to crush it. Every generation of Palestinians has faced a new iteration of the same colonial doctrine: eliminate them, scatter them, subjugate them, and they will disappear.
Yet here we are, witnessing not Palestinian defeat but Palestinian persistence. Sumoud. Every child who survives this genocide joins a lineage of defiance that spans generations. You cannot kill an idea whose time has come.
Excellent
Thank you for sharing this thought-provoking article highlighting the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The reported starvation and barriers to aid delivery are deeply concerning, as supported by credible sources like the WHO. To address this, all parties must ensure transparent aid distribution, grant independent journalists and aid workers access to Gaza, and prioritize urgent food and medical assistance for vulnerable populations, especially children. A balanced approach that fosters dialogue and accountability is crucial to alleviating suffering and finding sustainable solutions.