Two U.N. human rights experts used a New York briefing Thursday to describe the war’s toll on Gaza’s education and media sectors, citing widespread school destruction and nearly 300 media-worker deaths.
At an Oct. 29 event convened by the U.N. Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, Farida Shaheed, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to education, said destruction had affected 98% of Gaza’s schools and every one of its 13 universities. She put the Palestinian student death toll at almost 21,000.
Shaheed used “scholasticide” to describe the destruction of education and said it was aimed at dismantling the foundations of Palestinian society. Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, said Israel had killed nearly 300 journalists and media workers in Gaza since October 2023.
Albanese used “mediacide” for the silencing of journalists and control of information, which she said conceal violence from public scrutiny. A separate U.N. Special Procedures statement on her report to the General Assembly said Israeli forces had wounded more than 400 journalists. In her General Assembly remarks, Albanese also referred to Palestinian dispossession since the Nakba and a blockade lasting two decades.
The U.N. material identifies students, education staff, journalists and their families among those bearing the effects.
