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We are told, and told again, to consider Israeli crimes as excesses, to treat its army’s barbarism as regrettable overreach. This is what happens in war, plead Israel’s dutiful linebackers; savagery must be met in kind, goes the cynical and weary lament. “Whoever dares to accuse our soldiers of war crimes are hypocritical liars who lack so much as one drop of morality,” Netanyahu said in his infamous “Amalek” remarks. “The IDF is the most moral army in the world.” No bomb or shell is unleashed on hospital or museum, we’re reassured, without good intelligence of an enemy cache or bunker or tunnel. Such tortured logic has its limits. The artillery damage to the 1600-year-old St. Hilarion monastery complex—the oldest Christian site of its kind in the Middle East—was clearly inflicted because the plastic roof covering the ruins provides excellent cover from JDAM guided bombs. The Greek-era site of Anthedon Harbour with its cemetery and seaside ramparts needed to be fired upon in case it was used as a tactical defensive position. The Al Sammara bathhouse in Zeitoun Quarter, probably dating from the fourteenth century, was obviously obliterated because Hamas fighters were caught sweltering in their towels.

Kill the past, kill the future. Pride, inspiration, curiosity, passion—these are the emotions curtailed when you cut a people off from the roots of their land, when you shatter every place where those same emotions might be fulfilled. The Israeli army has made learning of any kind an impossibility. According to United Nations statistics, around 625,000 school-age children remain in Gaza, and not a single one of them has a place where they can study or be taught. In U.N. parlance, the total eradication of every school in Gaza is diplomatically called “no access to education.” 

What goes for children goes for adults, though only they can grasp the scale of what has been stripped from them. Israa University was opened in 2014 with a special emphasis on scholarships for the poor. Sixty-five percent of its students were women. “Poverty,” Dr Ahmed Alhussaina, Israa’s vice president, told The Intercept, “would not stand an obstacle in front of any Palestinian that wants to pursue a college degree.” The campus was kept intact longer than any of Gaza’s other universities because it was occupied as an IDF command post for two months; in mid-January, Israa was flattened to the cheers of watching troops. The 3,000 artifacts from Gaza’s pre-Islamic past in its collection were either looted or pulverised. The divisional commander responsible for bringing it down, Barak Hiram, was later censured for doing so without higher sanction—permission the commander’s superiors would have given anyway: “If you had submitted the request to collapse the university for my approval,” Major General Yaron Finkelman informed Hiram, “I would have approved it.”