Faculty for Palestine Canada condemns in the strongest terms the Israeli military strikes on the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) on Sunday, October 25, 2026. The university reported that its campus and the surrounding area were struck twice that day, while students were attending classes. Three members of the university’s administrative staff were killed, and seven students were injured, some critically.

We mourn our colleagues. We extend our deepest condolences to their families and to the entire IUG community, wish the injured students a full recovery, and extend our solidarity to the academic community across Palestine.

In a recent statement on the IUG assault, the Emergency Committee of Universities in Gaza, representing Gaza’s non-profit higher education sector, declared that “an attack on one of our universities is an attack on all of us.” The committee calls on universities and scholarly associations worldwide to condemn these attacks, demand their immediate end, pursue accountability under international law, support the ISNAD scholarship program, and build sustained collaborations with Gaza’s universities. 

We therefore urge faculty associations, senates and unions, scholarly associations, academic institutions and student unions across Canada to condemn scholasticide in Palestine, mobilize material and institutional solidarity, including support for the ISNAD program, the scholarship initiative established by Gaza’s universities to sustain students, faculty, and the operation of their institutions.

We call on Canadian universities and colleges to publicly condemn scholasticide in Palestine, and commit financial support and engage in collaborations with Gaza’s existing universities.

We call on the Government of Canada to condemn these Israeli ongoing attacks in Palestine and take concrete measures to end Canadian complicity in violations of international law in occupied Palestine, and support accountability for the destruction of the Palestinian education sector.

Faculty for Palestine Canada expresses its unequivocal solidarity with universities in Palestine, and fully supports the Emergency Committee of Universities in Gaza’s urgent call for international academic solidarity and accountability. These air strikes did not happen in isolation. Israeli bombardment destroyed much of IUG’s campus, along with every other university in Gaza, in the earliest months of the genocide that began in October 2023. Since then, Gaza’s faculty, staff, and students have rebuilt teaching and learning amid the ruins, in damaged buildings and online, refusing to let Palestinian higher education be erased. That a university was once again bombed with classes in session demonstrates that the assault on education in Gaza continues.

This is part of a much longer history of scholasticide: the systematic destruction of Palestinian education, knowledge production, intellectual and cultural life, a key feature of the ongoing Gaza Genocide. Since October 2023, this longstanding assault intensified catastrophically, destroying universities, libraries, archives, bookshops, cultural heritage, and the educational infrastructure essential to Palestinian collective life. The scholasticide in Gaza has already killed over 242 academics and more than 1,300 university students since October 2023, and has injured and forcibly displaced thousands of faculty, staff, and students.

This renewed assault comes alongside Israel’s ongoing military siege of Hebron in the illegally occupied West Bank, where sweeping closures and severe restrictions on movement are further disrupting higher education, preventing students and faculty from accessing their universities, which have now suspended in-person classes. Increased Israeli military raids have also taken place at Birzeit University in the past several years. These attacks across occupied Palestine form part of a broader assault on Palestinian knowledge production, cultural continuity, and the right to education.

As faculty and academic workers across Canada, we firmly reject scholasticide across Palestine; the normalization of these Israeli military attacks; and the silence of Canadian academic institutions, associations, and unions that profess commitments to academic freedom and human rights. We insist that defending Palestinian higher education is a collective academic responsibility.

Faculty for Palestine Canada stands with our Palestinian colleagues and their students in their struggle to defend their universities, their right to education, and their right to determine their future on their occupied lands.