On the US-Israeli Coalition’s Continued Acts of Scholasticide in the Middle East

With the killing of 175 school girls, educators, and parents in Minab, Iran, the latest chapter of the US-Israeli war in the Middle East began with a cruel act of scholasticide—a term many of us were not familiar with before the US-Israel coalition began waging it against Palestinians in Gaza in 2023.

Indeed, as US-Israel expands its aggressions across the region, the targeting and killing of educators, students and researchers is an increasing weapon in sowing chaos and instability.

Scholasticide, defined by the UN as the “systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure,” is a crucial element in destroying a society. Like all forms of genocide, scholasticide reveals “an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”—such as the Iranians, Palestinians and Lebanese—by rendering them unable to educate their young people (or even to keep them alive), create scholarship, perform research, or engage in the fundamental human necessity to teach and to learn from one another.

By the beginning of 2024 and just a few months into the war on Gaza, US-Israel had destroyed nearly 400 schools in the strip, including all 12 of its universities. This assault included the targeted assasination of hundreds of professors, journalists, and intellectuals.

Terrifyingly, this playbook is now in use throughout the region. For all the handwringing in America about alleged learning loss caused by shuttering our schools in 2020 in an attempt to stop the transmission of a virus which killed one million Americans, the United States seems largely unconcerned with the years of learning loss which our bombs are inflicting on millions of children in Palestine, Lebanon and Iran (to say nothing of the learning loss children we have subjected to in Iraq and Afghanistan for decades).

In Gaza, where more than 90 percent of school buildings have been destroyed, children are now missing a third year of regular school—with no end in sight.

As Afeef Nessouli and I recently reported in The Intercept, more than one million people have been displaced from southern Lebanon, driven north into the suburbs of Beirut.. (Ominously, Christians are being warned not to shelter displaced Muslims.) As Afeef shared from Ras Beirut’s Public Secondary School, many of the displaced are sleeping in school buildings, which have been commandeered as emergency shelters for hundreds of people. This means that the schools, as educational facilities, are closed; and while ad hoc educational measures are being enacted by volunteers, systemic education has stopped, teachers aren’t getting paid, and students are losing months of formal education (in addition to traumatic impacts on wellbeing and health from a lifetime of their little bodies being bombed).

Meanwhile, in Iran, more three million people have been displaced, resulting in an incalculable level not just of learning loss for children, but loss of childhood nutrition, medical access and overall safety. The terror Iranian children and their parents face is exasperated by knowing that the strike from a US-made Tomahawk cruise missile created a mass grave for dozens of their peers who did nothing other than go to school. (Actually, it was two strikes: in an even more morally depraved act, US-Israel enacted a “double tap” strike on the school—one to kill all those school girls, and another to kill the parents and first responders trying to save them.) This comes on top of at least 15 years of US-Israel assassinating Iranian university scientists and their families.

They cannot develop bombs and weapons at their universities to maim and murder the children of the world without putting their own students and faculty in harm’s way.

US-Israel is now engaged in a sustained attack on Iranian universities and research centers of all kinds—the kind of all encompassing attack it has used to try to destroy Palestinian history, science, medicine, and literature. They began with bombing Sharif University of Technology in Tehran and the plasma and laser research lab at Shahid Beheshti University. But they’ve expanded. As Science notes, “On the morning of 2 April, an explosion ripped through the Pasteur Institute of Iran, the country’s leading public health research center, obliterating key labs and biological collections.”

US-Israel’s attacks on Iranian universities have resulted in Iranian threats to US universities in the region in retaliation, leading schools like NYU, Northwestern, Georgetown and Cornell to close their imperial campus outposts in the Middle East.

I am not thrilled about Iran threatening US universities, because I do not want to see my students or colleagues harmed. Regardless of where any of us works or doesn’t work, they are all our students

But US-Israel cannot commit scholasticide in multiple countries across the Middle East and think that their students, faculty, and staff will be safe.

They cannot staff their boards with arms-makers and warmongers who earn their bread killing people and expect their own students will remain safe.

They cannot develop bombs and weapons at their universities to maim and murder the children of the world without putting their own students and faculty in harm’s way.

They cannot beat the shit out of their own students, those conscientious protesters putting their bodies on the line as they beg their institutions to divest from war…and then expect that students in their imperial campuses are going to be safe as the region is blown to bits by US-made bombs.

They cannot stay silent as journalists are killed off, one by one—by my account, almost 300 so far, across Iran, Palestine and Lebanon—and expect their students to be safe.

Indeed, it is their failure to see all of these people as our students and our colleagues, who need to be protected from US-made bombs, which is making the world less safe; not just for US academics and students in the Middle East, but for Americans (and all of humanity) the world over.

The failure of American universities and journalistic outlets to say anything about the killing of Ali Shoaib (al-Manar TV) and sibling journalists Fatima Ftouni and Mohamad Ftouni (in Lebanon) or Al Jazeera journalist Mohammed Wishah in Gaza, just in the last week, reveals not just a profound moral failure—but a nihilistic death wish. As does their failure to condemn the killing of 175 people at the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school.

When president Trump wrote that “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” it was an act of profound violence. Even though he did not, in the end, nuke Iran, his threat was violent in the same way an abusive husband commits violence whenever he waves his gun at or raises his fist above his wife: even if he doesn’t strike her, the threat alone is an act of violence.

Trump’s threats are an act of violence—as is his commitment to the destruction of Middle Eastern civilization through widespread scholasticide.

Please remember: they are all our students; they are all our colleagues. Our failure to honor them as such puts a target on all of our students and all of our colleagues.

And the US refusal to protect Iranian school girls, Palestinian school boys, and Lebanese journalists is putting humanity in grave danger.

Featured image: Israel’s bombing of IRGC facilities in June 2025, courtesy Avash Media.