On August 10, the Israeli bombardment of al-Tabin School in Gaza City killed more than 100 people sheltering there, including many children. This was one of 17 deadly attacks on schools in the strip that took place last month, according to the United Nations. Spaces of learning – transformed into shelters for the displaced – have become repeated targets in this war, as the line between combatants and civilians has been blurred.

This week, tens of thousands of children should be celebrating the beginning of a new school year. Instead, they are living through the nightmare of scholasticide – a word invented specifically to describe the obliteration of education in Gaza.

Dr Karma Nabulsi of Oxford University coined the term during the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2008-09, when schools, the Ministry of Education and other buildings related to learning were targeted. Today, the devastation wrought upon the education system in Gaza is unimaginable: Thousands of students and hundreds of teachers have been killed and hundreds of schools damaged or destroyed over the past 11 months.

This deliberate destruction of Gaza’s education system threatens not only the future of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children, but also the international humanitarian regime and our collective moral compass. It appears that global society is slowly accepting the unacceptable. The normalisation of violence against schools is a stark indicator of a deeper crisis in our global values, where the protection of the innocent is no longer guaranteed, and the very fabric of our humanity is unravelling.

The Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols state explicitly that attacking schools is a violation – and yet they continue. According to data collected by UNICEF, as of July 6, 318 schools in the Gaza Strip were directly targeted. Dozens of attacks have happened since then.

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