Tim Llewellyn, BPP website editor, summarises a powerful indictment of Israel’s international law violations at cultural and religious sites across Palestine
25 June 2025
The special United Nations body investigating Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territory has condemned Israel for repeated war crimes during its attacks on Gaza since 7 Oct 2023. Concentrating on Israel’s armed attacks on educational, cultural and religious sites, it also details severe and continual violations of international law in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
In its comprehensive report to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, says that since 7 Oct 2023 and up to February 2025, Israel forces
Attacked and damaged 403 out of 564 schools in Gaza, destroying 85 of them, and affecting thousands of students;[
Displaced people sheltered in United Nations Works and Relief Agency schools, killing 612 school staff;
Destroyed 57 university buildings, despite the report says, Israel’s regularly receiving from the UN the co-ordinates of UNRWA educational facilities.
The Commission says it could not identify any military objectives for these demolitions of schools and universities. Israel, it says, used schools for military purposes on 42 occasions; Hamas it verified as doing so once. It reports the Palestinian Ministry of Health as saying that by 27 March 2025, 15,613 children had been killed, and more than 658,000 children denied formal education. Everywhere, children had been forced to concentrate on survival, starvation and sub-human living conditions.
In the same period, the education system on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem was also seriously depleted by attacks and vandalism by Israeli army and security forces: 141 schools were attacked and wrecked, 96 students and four educational staff killed, 611 students and 21 educational staff injured, and 327 students and more than 170 educational staff arrested. In some areas students and staff lost up to half a school year.
The report also details serious restrictive measures applied to Palestinian Israelis, especially women, inside Israel itself.
There are further details of Israeli attacks on cultural and religious sites across occupied Palestine. In Gaza, 19 people were reportedly killed by an Israeli air strike on a Christian church, and Israeli forces shelled and bulldozed the 13th Century Pasha Palace Museum in Gaza City, with many artefacts “destroyed…removed or looted.” Many mosques were attacked and severely damaged, including the Great Omar Mosque, built in the 13th Century.
Another Israeli assault, on the Saad al-Ghafari Mosque in the centre of the Gaza Strip, in August 2024 killed 90 Gazans who were among hundreds sheltering their overnight.
In the West Bank and East Jerusalem there were continued raids on religious and cultural sites by Israeli security forces, army units, settlers and other extremists. The report details, for example, serious cases of interference with and attacks on worshippers at and near the Haram al-Sharif, in East Jerusalem, Islam’s third holiest site. Christian leaders and Christian holy places suffered similarly.
The Commission finds, inter alia, that Israel committed the war crimes of directing attacks against civilians, wilfull killing [of civilians] and intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that it would cause loss of life or injury to civilians beyond any military necessity. It says:”…[T]he Commission finds that in killing civilians sheltering in schools, Israel security forces committed the crimes against humanity of extermination.”
It balso notes that in previous reports it addressed the killing and abduction of Israeli children by Palestinian armed groups on 7 Oct 2023, and their physical and emotional mistreatment, and concluded that these acts constituted war crimes.
The commission reiterates serious concern about statements by Israeli politicians dismissing the existence of the Palestinian people. Noting the Israeli attacks on religious and cultural sites as an attempt to marginalise Palestinian territorial claims, to prevent religious practice and erase evidence of Palestinian history and culture, it says evidence of such conduct may “infer genocidal intent to destroy a protected group.” (author’s italics.)
The commission recommends that Israel immediately end the unlawful occupation of Palestinian territory, cease all settlement plans and remove all settlers and settlements from that territory, stop all attacks on cultural, religious and educational institutions and stop using them for military purposes.