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Today we rid ourselves of an armed intellectual brigade
who, with his pen, posed a greater threat to Israel
than a thousand armed fighters… – This is what Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said
upon the assassination of Ghassan Kanafani on 8 July, 1972
marwan
The media campaign targeting the Secretary-General of the Palestinian National Initiative Dr Mustafa Barghouti, sparked widespread political and national reactions after a clip was circulated and taken out of context relating to a speech, he delivered at a European meeting supporting Gaza. It was followed by accusations, doubts, and an escalation of rhetoric against him. Shortly after series of statements emerged rejecting the campaign against him, asserting it was a distortion, selective quoting, and misuse of his remarks.
The controversy began after Barghouti, speaking as a physician, stated “Israel has brutally and criminally killed at least 22,000 Palestinian children in Gaza.” He added however, that in recent months, the lives of “82,000 newborns who are now alive” had also been saved, and that for him, this “is not merely a humanitarian act, but an act of resistance.”
However, this statement was taken out of context and presented on some pages and accounts as a comparison between the number of martyred children and the number of births, which opened the door to a campaign accusing him of downplaying the tragedy in Gaza or dealing with it with insufficient sensitivity. In contrast, his defenders emphasized his remarks were about the Palestinian community’s ability to sustain life despite the annihilation, not about comparing death and birth.
Statements of Condemnation
The Hamas National Relations Department issued a statement condemning the media and incitement campaign against Barghouti, considering it to have been accompanied by “extraction, distortion, and misinterpretation of his statements to serve narratives and objectives that have no relation to the truth.”
The statement added that “extracting statements from their true context and misinterpreting them only serves to deepen the division and fragment national efforts at a time when our people are most in need of unity, integrated roles, and a focus on confronting the occupation and its ongoing crimes against our people.”
The department affirmed Barghouti “has been known for many years for his active national and political presence, and for his efforts in international forums to convey the Palestinian narrative and defend the rights of our people, in addition to his humanitarian, medical, and relief contributions,” considering this a “national asset that must be preserved and respected.”
It stressed that “differences of opinion or political assessment should not be transformed into insults, questioning of intentions, or distortion of national positions,” emphasizing that responsible dialogue and objective criticism must be based on complete facts, far removed from distortion and misrepresentation.
In the same context, the Palestinian National Commission for Popular Action issued a statement condemning the campaign. It stated that Barghouti is being subjected to “selective quoting and the distortion of his statements to serve narratives far removed from their true meaning.”
It added that Barghouti “has become a prominent national figure with international standing and symbolic significance,” stressing that differences of opinion “should not devolve into smear campaigns targeting national figures, especially at this critical juncture which demands strengthening national unity and directing efforts toward confronting the occupation and its ongoing crimes against our people.”
It also called for accuracy and objectivity, respect for political pluralism, and refraining from inflammatory rhetoric to preserve national unity and bolster the resilience of the Palestinian people.
Writers and Commentators: The Campaign Has Crossed the Line of Criticism
In addition to political statements, several Palestinian writers and commentators expressed their views, arguing that what happened to Barghouti crossed the line from criticism into deliberate destortion.
Writer Ahmed Bani Shaqour, in an article titled “When the Clean Is Attacked for Being Clean,” wrote that he read “an unjust and harsh attack on Dr. Mustafa Barghouti on a pro-establishment page,” which prompted him to write in his defense.
He said Barghouti “is not a political opportunist, nor a spokesperson for the authorities, nor a purveyor of slogans,” but rather “a son of the cause since the cost was high and privileges were nonexistent,” adding that he is “the doctor who did not abandon his profession for the first available position, the fighter who did not compromise his principles, and the Palestinian who did not change his compass.”
Bani Shaqour believes that Barghouti “disturbed them because he did not enter the market of deals, worried them because he does not sell his silence, and confused them because he is not adept at the language of justification,” concluding his article by saying: “When the clean is attacked, know that the battle is against him because he is clean.”
Background and Political Context of the Campaign
According to information circulating among observers, the campaign did not begin as a spontaneous objection to a statement made during an international event. Rather, it originated from pages and accounts known in recent years for attacking resistance forces and questioning their discourse. These include pages and individuals such as Ismat Mansour and Jamal Nazzal, as well as pages described by observers as fake accounts operating on behalf of security agencies within the Palestinian Authority.
In this context, the excerpted statement, according to these observers, became the entry point for a broader campaign that went beyond criticizing the wording to targeting Barghouti politically and morally.
This does not negate, according to observers, the right of any party to discuss or express reservations about wording, but it places the campaign in a context that transcends mere linguistic debate or disagreement over a specific expression.
From Criticizing the Statement to Targeting the Palestinian Voice
Observers believe that the core of the debate is not so much about a specific statement as it is related to Mustafa Barghouti’s standing in the Palestinian political and media landscape.
Since the outbreak of the war of annihilation on the Gaza Strip, Barghouti has emerged as one of the most prominent Palestinian figures in Arab and international media, combining his medical background with his political and rhetorical skills to deconstruct the Israeli narrative and defend the Palestinian narrative in a language that resonates with Western public opinion.
Therefore, a number of observers believe that targeting him cannot be separated from the battle over the narrative itself; that is, the struggle over who has the ability to represent the Palestinian voice in international forums, and who succeeds in conveying the Palestinian narrative to a global audience.
In this context, the selective use of a phrase from a speech that focuses primarily on the occupation’s crimes against the children of Gaza, and its subsequent transformation into a platform for accusing its author, reflects—according to these observers—a fundamental flaw.
In terms of priorities, the debate shifts from the original crime to the person who exposes it.
Ultimately, the campaign targeting Mustafa Barghouti reveals a highly sensitive internal Palestinian landscape, where narrative battles intertwine with political disputes, and where a single phrase taken out of context is enough to unleash a wave of doubt and incitement.
While his critics argue that some of his statements warrant discussion and scrutiny, statements and positions defending him assert that what transpired went beyond mere criticism to a smear campaign based on extracting words from their context and repurposing them in an internal battle that only serves to deepen the division.
Between the right to criticize and the duty of fairness, there is an urgent need to protect the national discourse from descending into accusations of treason and defamation, and to keep the focus on the core of the struggle: The occupation, the genocide, and the Palestinian narrative, which must be conveyed to the world in its entirety, not in a fragmented form according to Quds Press.
CrossFireArabia
CROSSFIREARABIA – Gaza has been without electricity for more than 1000 days now contributing to the harshness of life. The tents sting during the day because of the scorching sun while at night its total darkness that is unimaginable. Over the past months, the people of the Gaza Strip have tried to find alternatives to the absence of electricity but these were met with soaring prices. Private generators require energy that is harshly expensive and the great many of people can’t afford it because there is simply no income sources. For full story see: Palestine Information Center.
CrossFireArabia
By Hani Shehada
In 2005, a university in the United Kingdom offered me a scholarship. I never set foot on its campus. I could not leave Gaza.
The crossing through which I would have travelled had been closed for more than six months, and a locked gate does not read acceptance letters.
By the time it might have opened, the place would have belonged to someone else, to another academic year, another student, another version of my life.
I have carried that small, private loss for more than 20 years. I raise it now only because it has become the most modest possible version of something far larger: The systematic narrowing of an entire generation’s future.
The destruction of education in Gaza cannot be understood only through the number of buildings reduced to rubble.
Its defining feature is its reach across the entire learning system. Schools and universities have been damaged or destroyed.
Students, teachers and professors have been killed or displaced. Libraries, laboratories, archives and other repositories of knowledge have been erased.
United Nations experts and a growing body of academic research have described this pattern as ‘scholasticide’: the systematic destruction of education through attacks on its institutions, infrastructure, students, educators and intellectual life.
The term captures something that statistics alone cannot. What is being lost is not a collection of isolated buildings, but the foundations through which a society preserves knowledge, prepares its young people and imagines a future.
The scale is difficult to comprehend. By July 2025, 97 percent of Gaza’s schools had sustained damage.
United Nations experts reported that all 12 of Gaza’s universities had been damaged or destroyed; a later UNESCO assessment found that 95 percent of higher-education campuses had been affected, with most buildings destroyed or rendered unusable.
More than 68 million metric tons of debris now cover Gaza. Hundreds of teachers, professors and other education workers have been killed.
But the loss of a scholar cannot be measured as the loss of a building can.
It is the disappearance of decades of accumulated knowledge: The lectures never delivered, the research never completed, the students never mentored and the future teachers, doctors, engineers and writers who will never encounter that person in a classroom.
Ordinary foundations of classrooms
For Gaza’s children, education now survives largely through improvisation. Hundreds of temporary learning spaces have been assembled in tents, shelters and damaged buildings.
The word “temporary” has become misleading. For many children, these spaces are not a bridge back to school. They are the only school they know.
Picture it plainly: children sitting on the ground, with no desks or chairs; A teacher working beneath plastic sheeting, without reliable light, electricity or a proper board.
The tent is stifling in summer and vulnerable to rain and flooding in winter. At times, even the most basic tools of learning have been unavailable.
For more than two years, educational materials were prevented from entering Gaza. Not weapons. Pencils, notebooks, exercise books, crayons and rulers.
Only in January 2026 did UNICEF announce that thousands of basic learning and recreational kits had begun entering Gaza after more than two years of restrictions. Reuters news agency reported that the kits contained pencils, but textbooks were still not permitted.
Read that again. We are not debating curricula, teaching methods or class sizes. We have reached the question of whether a child may have a pencil.
A pencil should not be a subject of negotiation. Nor should a desk, a page or a roof. These are the ordinary foundations of a classroom, the things assumed to exist before a lesson begins.
In Gaza, they have become objects of longing: A child wishing for a notebook, a teacher forced to improvise without the simplest tools, the ordinary conditions of learning placed beyond reach.
Gaza is often described as a place Palestinians are desperate to escape. That framing misses something essential.
For many Palestinians I know, leaving is not the dream. The dream is to remain, to study, work, raise a family and build a future in the place they call home, without being imprisoned within it.
But the space in which that life might be lived continues to contract.
In late May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli forces occupied over 60 percent of Gaza and had been instructed to expand that occupation to 70 percent.
Almost the entire population of roughly two million people are confined to a small coastal strip, most displaced and many displaced repeatedly.
The routes on which a life may depend, to reach medical treatment, accept a scholarship, reunite with family or move beyond the path of another evacuation order, remain restricted, uncertain or closed.
To be trapped is not only to be denied departure. It is to watch the boundaries of ordinary life close around you: the space to live, to learn, to recover and, one day, to rebuild.
Within that shrinking geography, children are still expected to learn. They arrive at tents and damaged buildings without reliable electricity, safe water, desks or textbooks.
Some carry injuries that require treatment unavailable in Gaza. Some are living with disabilities. Some have lost one parent, both parents or entire branches of their families.
Yet they are still asked to sit down, concentrate and imagine a future, as though hope itself requires no shelter.
In 2005, a closed border cost one student one opportunity. What is happening now is not the loss of a single chance, but the systematic narrowing of a generation’s future.
Education cannot wait
Gaza’s young people stand before doors held shut: The door to a classroom, an examination, a university place, a recognized qualification and, ultimately, a working life. My loss was one interrupted chapter.
For them, interruption has become the architecture of childhood itself, year after year in which education is delayed, diminished or placed entirely beyond reach.
There is one more word the world reaches for when it speaks about Gaza: Resilience.
That resilience is real. I have witnessed it all my life. But the word becomes dangerous when it allows the outside world to admire Palestinian endurance rather than confront the conditions that make such endurance necessary.
There is nothing inspiring about a child learning her letters on the floor of a tent. There is nothing noble about forcing a generation to prove, again and again, that it still wants a future.
Children should not have to be resilient. They should have schools.
I am not asking for sympathy. Sympathy did not open the border for me in 2005, and it will not open it for Gaza’s students now.
I’m asking to stop treating education as something that can wait, until after the war, after reconstruction, after every other need deemed more urgent.
That order is backwards.
For generations of Palestinians, education has been more than a route to employment.
It has been a means of preserving identity, dignity and possibility under Israeli occupation and forced displacement. A pencil is not what you provide once the serious work is finished.
And the pencil is serious work. The fact that even pencils were kept out reveals how consequential the right to learn has become.
I was eventually able to begin again elsewhere. Most young people in Gaza have no such second chance.
The obligation now is to ensure that education survives with them: that there are teachers to learn from, examinations they can sit, qualifications the world will recognise and universities prepared to receive them.
Because a generation cannot be asked to rebuild Gaza after the world has allowed every path to its future to be erased.
The writer Hani Shehada, an educational expert in Gaza, contributed this article to TRTWorld.
CrossFireArabia
The Irish Parliament has passed a bill banning the import of goods from Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. This a first for a country in the European Union, although its expected economic impact is likely to be limited many argue.
The bill prohibits the import of goods produced in Israeli settlements that are strewn across the occupied West Bank. The bill includes a ban on agricultural, commercial, and other products. The legislation is now scheduled to go to the Senate for final approval before coming into effect.
The Irish government stated that the bill was based on the 2014 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, which ruled that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip is illegal under international law.
Ireland continues to take a hard line against the Israeli occupation. It recognized the State of Palestine in 2014 and last month barred Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich from entering the country due to their stances and actions toward activists on the “Global Steadfastness Flotilla.”
For its part, Israel closed its embassy in Dublin at the end of last year, accusing the Irish government of pursuing “hostile policies.”
Dublin has also been calling for a review of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, which forms the basis of trade relations between the two sides. The EU announced last month that it was considering options to restrict trade with settlements, but a lack of consensus among member states prevented further action.
Despite the political implications of the decision, the economic impact of the bill is expected to be limited. Irish imports from Israeli settlements did not exceed €1 million between 2020 and 2024 and were limited to goods such as fruits, vegetables, and timber.
Opposition MPs criticized the bill, arguing that it was insufficient because it did not include trade in services. The government, however, maintained that imposing restrictions on services faced legal complexities and that it preferred to pass actionable legislation at this stage, with the possibility of expanding its scope in the future according to Quds Press.
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