By Moon Younes, in consultation with Ramya Kumar
In the course of the Gaza Genocide, Israel has dismantled Palestinian education both through the direct violence of bombing and through the slow, cumulative effects of hunger, displacement, and systematic destruction. Even in the absence of active violence, starvation, food insecurity, and the collapse of basic sanitation systems disrupt children’s cognitive, emotional, and psychological development, leading to enduring deficits in memory, attention, and learning retention. In Gaza, these conditions are not isolated crises; they are part of a comprehensive assault on life itself, with one in five children suffering from malnourishment.
The horrors of this genocide are so intimately woven into every aspect of daily life that discrete impacts like hunger risk becoming invisible in their ubiquity. Yet starvation is not a background condition. It is a method of erasure, one that sabotages not only the body but the mind, the capacity to learn, grow, and dream. Similar to how scholasticide targets Gaza’s future for destruction, the starvation of its population is deliberately designed to not only impede individuals’ ability to live but also society’s capacity to grow.
This essay traces the invisible violence of hunger: how it breaks down students’ ability to focus, to remember, to hope. It also focuses on how the people of Gaza, especially its educators and children, resist this violence. When every element of life is under siege—from nutrition to psychological safety to the right to learn—they are no longer isolated losses, but rather facets of a broader scholasticide. And while Gaza today represents the sharpest point of this crisis, history has shown us, from Bosnia to Rwanda, Syria to Yemen, that starvation alone can scar the future of a generation.
IPC Analysis: Gaza’s Educational and Health Crisis
Action Against Hunger states that “50% of households in Gaza are experiencing ‘Catastrophic’ levels of hunger (IPC Phase 5).” That is more people, proportionally, than during famines in Somalia in 2011 (~490k in Phase 5) or South Sudan in 2017 (~80k in Phase 5). Furthermore, the speed of onset has been much more rapid in Gaza. As humanitarian expert Alex de Waal notes, Gaza’s descent from crisis to near-famine happened within months, surpassing the pace of nearly all other modern man-made famines, including those in Yemen and Syria.
Since the collapse of the ceasefire on March 17, 2025, Gaza has endured a catastrophic breakdown of its nutrition infrastructure, plunging over 500,000 residents into IPC Phase 5 starvation—the most extreme level of food insecurity according to the International Food Policy Research Institute in a 2025 assessment. This disaster has been deepened by a staggering 3,000% surge in wheat flour prices since February 2025, rendering basic staples unaffordable for most families (IPC Snapshot, May 12, 2025). Children are bearing the heaviest burden. UNICEF reports a sharp rise in acute malnutrition and dehydration among Gaza’s youth, noting that even in relative calm, severe cognitive impairments emerge in the absence of direct violence during the ceasefire. Meanwhile, Save the Children notes that Gaza now has the world’s highest child malnutrition rate. The organization cites evidence showing that early stunting causes about 0.7 grade levels of lost learning, and delays school start by around 7 months. Global analyses concur: stunted children typically attain ~1.6 fewer years of schooling than peers. IPC and UNICEF assessments also confirm widespread stunting and catastrophic levels of food insecurity among school-aged children, underscoring the impact of the crisis on Gaza’s next generation.
This grave convergence of nutritional deprivation and educational destruction amounts to scholasticide, where hunger is wielded as a weapon to erode the intellectual future of an entire generation. Beyond immediate suffering, the cognitive devastation caused by prolonged starvation, combined with the disintegration of educational systems, threatens the long-term social and economic resilience of Palestinian society.
The Neurological and Psychological Toll of Starvation on Children
Chronic protein–energy malnutrition in children initiates a devastating cascade of neurocognitive impairments, including slowed cognitive processing, diminished working memory, and compromised attention spans. These conditions are already manifest in Gaza. ActionAid (Palestine) has documented that Gaza’s children as well as medical staff are suffering from severe trauma and hunger, many to the point of forgetting how to read basic letters and words after prolonged school closures and displacement.
In the most severe cases, the effects of starvation take the form of kwashiorkor—a life-threatening condition of acute protein-energy malnutrition. Characterized by bilateral edema, muscle wasting, dermatosis, and growth failure, kwashiorkor also carries profound neurological consequences: emotional blunting, delayed speech, learning disengagement, and apathy. Among all of these symptoms, the emergence of edema is particularly alarming for health officials worldwide. Edema is a type of swelling caused by fluid retention in the body, most often seen in pregnant people and those over the age of sixty-five as a result of natural strain on the veins. Nutritional edema emerges when the body retains fluid in an attempt to maintain basic vital functions in the face of starvation. While typically associated with famine zones, recent reports confirm its exponential rise in Gaza over the past two years, with cases emerging among children as young as one. Findings from Gaza’s Nutrition Projection and Francesco Checchi and Zeina Jamaluddine confirm that such diagnoses, rare or nonexistent in pre-war Gaza, have now become tragically routine. Pediatricians at Nasser Hospital and field teams from Médecins Sans Frontières have also reported that a growing number of children are presenting classic symptoms of both kwashiorkor and marasmus, including emotional withdrawal and extreme fatigue. The physiological and mental health effects of starvation compound one another.
Nutritional deficits unravel the very cognitive foundation upon which learning is built. Undernourished children face profound difficulties with visuospatial processing and sustained concentration, making classroom engagement, memory retention, and basic learning tasks significantly harder. For children in Gaza, who have lost not only classrooms but any notion of educational stability, the cognitive toll of starvation is compounded by the relentless physical and psychological trauma of bombardment, displacement, and grief.
Children in Gaza are not disengaged because of disinterest or intellectual disability, but because their brains are quite literally starving. The nutrients essential to cognitive function, speech acquisition, and emotional regulation are absent. Studies confirm that children affected by kwashiorkor suffer persistent language delays, impaired social-emotional processing, and learning disabilities that can last a lifetime. Even with nutritional rehabilitation, damage sustained during critical developmental periods is not easily reversed. In this light, kwashiorkor must be understood not merely as a humanitarian emergency, but as a direct assault on children’s ability to learn, remember, and relate. It is scholasticide at the cellular level.
Comparative Cases: Starvation’s Scholastic Toll in Global War Zones
The educational and cognitive toll of wartime starvation has been tragically consistent across multiple global contexts, underscoring a pattern of long-term scholastic devastation in conflict zones. During the 1992–96 siege of Sarajevo, Bosnian children exposed to prolonged hunger and violence exhibited persistent learning delays, memory impairments, trouble focusing and emotional withdrawal in classrooms well into their adolescence. Two separate studies also documented lower educational attainment for populations exposed to the blockade and genocide. In post-genocide Rwanda, children who experienced early-life malnutrition showed markedly lower literacy rates and academic performance throughout their teenage years, despite the cessation of active violence. Even in host countries removed from direct conflict, displacement and food insecurity among children led to lower mean IQ scores, decreased motivation, and diminished school engagement. In Yemen, years of siege and blockade between 2015 and 2020 resulted in catastrophic educational setbacks: UNICEF and ICRC confirm that over two million children were out of school by mid‑2020, rising from about 1.8 million in 2015–16, as a result of ongoing conflict and blockade. These cases illustrate that starvation and food insecurity, whether through siege, genocide, or displacement, systematically strip children of their intellectual development and future capacity to learn.
Synthesis and Implications
Gaza’s current trajectory tragically mirrors patterns observed in Bosnia, Rwanda, Syria, and Yemen, where starvation coupled with disrupted schooling functioned as a deliberate assault on an entire generation’s intellect and memory. The protracted siege and bombardment have weaponized hunger into a tool of scholasticide, threatening to rob Gaza’s children not only of education but of their cognitive potential and future.
Over a year after the school closures in October 2023, Gaza’s Ministry of Education launched a compressed academic semester on February 23, 2025, marking a tentative but critical return to formal schooling. Approximately 150,000 students returned to 165 government schools, which operated on triple shifts to address overwhelming demand amid severe infrastructural degradation. Despite these efforts, pervasive shortages of food and clean water continue to undermine educational environments, with local NGOs and community kitchens providing only sporadic and insufficient support. As many children are also left orphaned or as providers for their families in the wake of ever increasing casualties amongst the broader population, children are also burdened with the responsibility to sustain themselves and their families by retrieving water and food during the day rather than studying.
Yet, amidst extreme deprivation, educators and families persist in their commitment to education, asserting it not only as a fundamental right but as a form of resistance against systematic attempts to erase their future. This reality highlights an urgent imperative: any meaningful education recovery plan must be holistic, integrating emergency feeding programs, targeted micronutrient supplementation, and trauma-informed psychosocial interventions. Furthermore, longitudinal monitoring of the cognitive and emotional wellbeing of affected children should be embedded within global child protection frameworks to mitigate the enduring consequences of this orchestrated crisis. Without such comprehensive, coordinated responses, Gaza’s children are threatened with a future not only of trauma but of profound cognitive incapacitation, imperiling the community’s long-term resilience and recovery.
Starvation in Gaza is not merely the collateral damage of conflict; it is a deliberate instrument of scholasticide designed to erase the cognitive potential of an entire generation. Through hunger, dehydration, and forced isolation from education, Gaza’s children are suffering a profound assault, not only on their bodies but on their minds, memories, and futures. If the international community fails to urgently address this crisis, Gaza’s future will be condemned not only to illiteracy but to oblivion, as a generation’s knowledge, creativity, and identity are systematically extinguished.