Gaza has been flattened by Israeli attacks. Ninety per cent of schools have been damaged, or destroyed. Two thirds of schools, 285 of them, have been completely destroyed. All universities have been destroyed. The United Nations has called Israel’s deliberate targeting of Gaza’s education infrastructure, scholasticide.

Sam Rose, Senior Deputy Director of UNRWA says, “Israel has killed a classroom of children every single day for a whole year”. All surviving children have missed a year of school, and are being intentionally starved. The entire population has been displaced. Thousands of children have had limbs amputated without anaesthetic.

The genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza is a world historic crime, unfurling before our eyes. Israeli terror has now been expanded into Lebanon and the West Bank, and they have also bombed Syria, Yemen, and Iran.

In a Sydney Morning Herald article on October 18 Gemma Quinn from the Parents and Citizens Federation says, “Parents want their children to learn about current affairs as part of the curriculum, not as an in-classroom protest”. But school children are not learning anything about what is happening. The Herald reporters would have learnt that if they had bothered to contact us for comment.

Public school students watch the genocide on their smartphones, but are then told explicitly that they cannot talk about it in class. There is silence in the schools run by the NSW Department of Education. The Department issued directives telling principals and teachers to ‘remain neutral on the........

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