Witnessing scholasticide in Gaza: A conversation forum

Introduction

At this toxic political moment, Lubna Abu Sitta’s powerful intervention is vital reading. To my knowledge, it is among the first eyewitness accounts of the scholasticide taking place in Gaza that has been published in an academic journal (also see Hamamra 2026; Junina 2026). This is not incidental. The systematic destruction of educational spaces across occupied Palestine has not only turned classrooms and libraries into rubble, as well as leaving countless teachers and students dead or injured (OHCHR 2024), it has also attempted to silence the scholarly voices that might bear witness to that destruction. The rarity of such testimony in venues like this academic journal further reflects longstanding inequalities in whose knowledge ‘counts’, and whose perspectives are recognised and archived within academic institutions. Written from an active warzone and under a state of violent occupation, Abu Sitta’s intervention stands out, however modestly, as a direct challenge to the coloniality of knowledge production. As she states in her intervention: ‘This writing becomes an act of resistance against erasure’ (Abu Sitta 2026, 1).

Notably for readers of EPC: Politics and Space, Abu Sitta bears witness to this destruction from the perspective of a geographer. As a postgraduate student in the Geography Department at Al-Aqsa University in Khan Yunis, she documents how Israeli bombardment has killed two of her Geography professors: Dr Abdel Nasser Al-Saqqa and Dr Wiesam Essa. She also describes the death of her close friend Shahd, ‘an outstanding geography student who has tragically become one of at least 5479 students estimated to have been martyred’ (Abu Sitta 2026). Her intervention also addresses the question: ‘what does this scholasticide actually look like?’ (Abu Sitta 2026). The answer is a vivid scene of loss: of empty lecture podiums and green courtyards turned to dust; of a once-vibrant campus hastily converted into a makeshift refugee camp [see Figure 1]; and of ‘geography classrooms that witnessed our dreams before they turned into rubble’ (Abu Sitta 2026). As Joronen and Dader (2026) highlight in their accompanying piece: ‘There remains a geographical undertone in Abu Sitta’s commentary too, the genocide being articulated firsthand by someone who not only has a background in studying geography but writes in ways that divulge key geographic realities while picturing the landscapes of living with and beyond the settler colonial erasure.’OPEN IN VIEWER

Geographicide

Central to Israel’s efforts at settler colonial erasure has been scholasticide: ‘the deliberate destruction of educational institutions and knowledge systems as a strategy to extinguish a people’s collective future’ (Alsemeiri 2026, 1397). Conceptualised by Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi, scholasticide has long been a characteristic of Israeli occupation (see Alsemeiri 2026; Dader et al., 2024). It is beyond the scope of this short introduction to fully detail the enormity of educational devastation wrought by Israel, to which Abu Sitta bears witness (but see Dader et al., 2024; OHCHR 2024; Alarabeed 2025; Hajir and Qato 2025; Hamamra 2026; Alsemeiri 2026). It is worth emphasising, however, that ‘no other armed conflict on record has a comparable incidence of attacks significantly affecting every higher education institution’ (Milton, 2026, 4). This should be of concern to all of us. Set against the vast scale of this devastation which has left students and educators dead and the majority of schools and universities destroyed (Davies et al., 2026; Hamamra 2026; OHCHR 2024), is what Abu Sitta describes as an ‘intimate scholasticide’: a deeply personal experience of lost geography mentors, painful memories of her first days at University, and the struggle to complete her Master’s degree amongst the wreckage of Israeli occupation and siege. As Agha and Griffiths (2026) write in their commentary: ‘Abu Sitta does not simply tell us she is a geographer, she shows us the violence of obliterated space as well as the adaptive spatial struggles of maintaining a grasp on her chosen discipline’. Indeed, Abu Sitta describes feeling ‘technologically orphaned’ and ‘lost’ whilst struggling to complete her GIS coursework without the help of her professors, posing a question that no geography student should ever have to: ‘how can I complete my maps when the hand that used to correct them has been killed?’ (Abu Sitta 2026, 2).

At the time of writing, at least four geography professors are known to have been killed by Israel since October 2023, with a fifth reported case still being verified. Alongside the two professors who taught Abu Sitta at Al-Aqsa University’s Department of Geography—Dr. Abdel Nasser Al-Saqqa and Dr Wiesam Essa—two others are known to have been killed: Ali Taysir Al-Rantisi (27), a GIS lecturer in the Department of Geography at the Islamic University of Gaza, and Dr Naeem Salman Baroud (61), a geography professor at the same University. Mr Mohammad Al-Najjar, an hourly paid geography instructor at Islamic University of Gaza, has also reportedly been killed, though details are still emerging (Alsemeiri pers. comm. 2026). They reportedly died when Israeli bombs targeted their homes (Geographers for Justice in Palestine, 2026). Their deaths are part of wider reports of the ‘targeted killing of academics’ (Alsemeiri 2025, 3). Research with university students in Gaza found that 70% had lost professors, while 85% were grieving the loss of a classmate (Alsemeiri 2026).

Reflecting on the loss of her favourite geography professor, Abu Sitta describes how ‘Israel did not just kill a geography teacher, but assassinated a “compass” that was guiding us towards our homeland’ (Abu Sitta 2026). In this way, her account not only provides evidence of scholasticide, but also points towards what we might cautiously describe as geographicide: the killing of geographers, the destruction of geographical knowledge, and the ruination of places of geographical learning. As noted elsewhere (Geographers for Justice in Palestine, 2026), all of this has taken place using the tools and methods of geography itself, from AI-powered GIS targeting techniques to the mapping of occupation zones, and the cartographic erasure of Palestine in the US-backed ‘masterplan’ for Gaza. Writing as a geographer, Abu Sitta shrewdly observes that this violence is ‘aimed at erasing us from memory and uprooting our awareness of place’.

Introducing this conversation forum

Five geographers with expertise about Palestine were invited to respond to Abu Sitta’s powerful intervention: Zena Agha, Mark Griffiths, Khalid Dader, Mikko Joronen, and Nicole Printy Currie. Their reflections are presented in three commentaries, offering perspectives from both postgraduate researchers and senior geographers. Together, these texts help ask critical questions about the role of universities and geography amid genocide, the practice of writing, and broader contestations over knowledge and justice.

Agha and Griffiths’s commentary emphasises how the global academic community must prioritise efforts to support Palestinian academia (see also Agha et al., 2024), describing Abu Sitta’s intervention as ‘a gracious call for solidarity’ (Agha and Griffiths 2026). Whilst remaining careful not to romanticize the “resilience” of those living under colonial occupation (Dader et al., 2025), they rightly emphasise that her testimony—of continuing to study amid conditions of scholasticide—underscores how ‘colonial power is always incomplete, [and is] never able to capture the inherent “ungovernability” of life in Palestine and elsewhere’ (Agha and Griffiths 2026; also Joronen and Griffiths, 2022).

Printy Currie’s commentary responds to Abu Sitta’s formidable testimony by asking: ‘what is required of us, those who read these stories, testimonies and accounts of erasure, survival, resistance, and belonging?’ (Printy Currie, 2026). Her answer is to not be a passive bystander, but to ‘write with and not about’ Gaza, in a context where ‘story-dwelling' and ‘intentional unforgetting’ can become a ‘fugitive practice’ (ibid) that defies the logic of colonial occupation.

Relatedly, Joronen and Dader’s commentary reflects on the importance and impossibility of writing during an ongoing genocide (see also Salamanca et al., 2024). They note how Abu Sitta’s intervention demonstrates ‘the need to write—to narrate and put into words, and affect, what seems impossible to speak of’ (Joronen and Dader, 2026). Reflecting on Abu Sitta’s words, they describe writing as a means of bearing witness to embodied and spatial loss, a tool for resisting erasure, and a response to the silence that ‘can lurk at the shadows of normalising the devastation’ (Joronen and Dader, 2026).

Against academic silence

Writing against the erasure of Palestine, Abu Sitta concludes her intervention with an important provocation: ‘I am writing against the silence of geographers. The silence of academics who have the power to say something but choose not to’ (Abu Sitta 2026). As others, including Geographers for Justice in Palestine (2026) have noted, the deaths of our colleagues during this genocide have, with some exceptions, not generated the level of commentary or protest that might be expected. Scholasticide in Gaza has not only involved the physical destruction of universities within Palestine, it has also relied upon the complicity of Universities beyond it. Universities globally stand accused of symbolic and material complicity with Israeli atrocities (Ghantous 2026; Hajir and Qato 2025; Ibrahim and Heleta 2025; Wind 2024), through the suppression of solidarity and, as Abu Sitta indicates, the silence of those in positions of power (Alarabeed 2025; Ibrahim and Heleta 2025).

As Alarabeed (2025) describes, scholasticide ‘is not only the bombing of classrooms but also the refusal to think, the reproduction of hegemonic knowledge, and the every-day bureaucratic practices that render atrocity acceptable.’ Abu Sitta’s intervention is an important counter-hegenomic, or ‘counter-cartographic’ (Agha and Griffiths 2026) account, that details the reality of scholasticide taking place in Palestine. Her intervention fits squarely with the mission of EPC: Politics and Space to ‘include voices, ideas, scholarship, and places in the world that have been under-represented in geography’s publication venues over the years’ (Daley et al., 2017, 3). Her words, and the three commentaries in this conversation forum, respond to calls for ‘an engaged academy that listens to and cares for Palestinian voices’ (Dader et al., 2025, 57), and they dovetail with other recent work published in this journal about Palestine (see Bhungalia 2020; Yang, C., 2020; Sen 2021; Griffiths 2022; Joudah 2025).

Whilst ‘geographic epistemologies and methods…are central to the occupation of Palestine’ (Geographers for Justice in Palestine 2026, 9), Abu Sitta demonstrates how geography education can also serve as a project of resistance. Her testimony presents a different vision of the discipline: one committed to Palestinian liberation. As she writes, ‘geographical knowledge endures beyond the destruction of classrooms’ (Abu Sitta 2026). Comparing her martyred geography professors to a “compass” that continues to guide her, she ends her intervention: ‘The “compass” they left in our souls still points towards the truth, and towards Gaza, whose terrain we will redraw with our knowledge, our tears, and our unbreakable will.’ In the shadow of the scholasticide that Abu Sitta so vividly describes, it is my hope that her intervention will be taught in geography classrooms, discussed in seminars, and read by geography students for years to come. Writing amidst ‘a genocidal reality the world has failed to end’ (Dader et al., 2025, 52), Abu Sitta offers not only a testimony of loss, but also a powerful affirmation of the enduring possibilities of geographical knowledge and Palestinian intellectual life.