A school in Beersheba has decided to temporarily suspend a Palestinian student from school to investigate the veracity of her accusation of incitement against the Israeli army, despite the fact that dozens of Jewish students appeared in a video recording chanting racist slogans calling for genocide against her, after she said in class that there are innocent people in Gaza.
Haaretz quoted the Israeli Ministry of Education as claiming that the 12-year-old student incited against the army and directed harsh words at her Jewish classmates, before returning and justifying the temporary suspension decision by its desire to prevent friction between the student and the rest of her classmates.
“May your village burn”
Dozens of students were seen in a video chanting “May your village burn” in a racist scene, which the girl’s father said the school did not try to intervene to stop.
The newspaper quoted the girl as saying that she said in a class discussion that “there are children starving and dying in Gaza,” but her Jewish classmates attacked her and shouted at her, “Our soldiers are not murderers,” even though she did not say this.
She added: “They asked me if I supported Palestine, and I simply said that I supported the return of the children of Gaza to their homes.”
The student said that she has been exposed to similar situations since the beginning of the year, where she was asked, for example, if she was a member of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), simply because she was wearing the hijab.
The Arab48 website quoted political activist and lawyer Shahada Bin Bri, who is defending the family, as saying that what saved the student from being attacked was the presence of an Arab teacher who took her to the school administration, and then the family was contacted and informed that the child had been temporarily expelled.
Lawyer Ben Bri spoke about dozens of threats directed at the girl and her family from different regions, some of whom even threatened to behead her.
The incitement did not stop at the students and the school administration, but extended to the city authorities, as members of the Beersheba municipality and the deputy mayor demanded that the student and her family be expelled from the city and even from all of Israel.
The student’s father decided not to send his second daughter to school for fear of her, while other fathers refused to send their children for the same reason, and also out of solidarity with the father of the expelled student.
With American support, Israel has been waging a devastating war on Gaza since October 7, leaving more than 137,000 Palestinian martyrs and wounded, most of them children and women, and more than 10,000 missing, amid massive destruction and deadly famine.
In contempt of the international community, Israel continues the war, ignoring the UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate halt, and the International Court of Justice’s orders to take measures to prevent genocide and improve the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza.