What happened
Three people were killed on Sunday in an Israeli attack on the Islamic University in Gaza City. The al-Shifa hospital states that the three dead belonged to the university's administrative staff. An additional eight people, all students, are being treated for injuries after the drone strike. According to the local civil defence, four people were also killed in other locations in the area during the same day.
Our analysis
When universities and higher education institutions are bombed, it is not just buildings that are hit. It is a society's intellectual life and future being razed. For many new Swedes with roots in the region, these are not distant news items, but reports about former classmates, teachers, and relatives.
Swedish reporting often reduces attacks on civilian educational institutions to brief numerical reports. At the same time, there is a telling silence from Swedish higher education institutions and politicians who, in other contexts, are usually quick to defend academic freedom and the right to a safe education.
This silence normalises an order in which human lives and educational environments are valued differently depending on where they are located. Destroying universities robs an entire generation of the opportunity to rebuild their society, and it must be scrutinized with the same rigour as any other severe attack against civilian structures.