Malala Yousafzai says ‘Israel has decimated the entire education system’ in Gaza

ISLAMABAD: Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai on Sunday said she would continue to call out Israel’s violations of international law and human rights in Gaza.

The education advocate was speaking at a global summit on girls’ education in Muslim world hosted by Pakistan and attended by representatives from dozens of countries.

“In Gaza, Israel has decimated the entire education system,” she said in an address to the conference.

Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai to visit Pakistan for girls’ summit

“They have bombed all universities, destroyed more than 90 percent of schools, and indiscriminately attacked civilians sheltering in school buildings.

“I will continue to call out Israel’s violations of international law and human rights.”

Yousafzai was shot when she was a 15-year-old schoolgirl by militants enraged by her education activism.

She made a remarkable recovery after being evacuated to the United Kingdom and went on to become the youngest ever Nobel Prize winner at the age of 17.

“Palestinian children have lost their lives and future. A Palestinian girl cannot have the future she deserves if her school is bombed and her family is killed,” she added.

The war in Gaza was sparked by Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, which resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.

During the attack, Palestinian took 251 people hostage, of whom 94 remain in the Gaza Strip, including 34 the Israeli military has declared dead.

Malala Yousafzai ‘overwhelmed and happy’ to be back in Pakistan

Israel’s retaliatory military aggression in Gaza has killed 46,537 people, the majority civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory considered reliable by the United Nations.

Malala Yousafzai tells Muslim leaders not to ‘legitimise’ Taliban

Meanwhile, Malala Yousafzai urged Muslim leaders on Sunday not to legitimise the Afghan Taliban government and to “show true leadership” over their assault on women’s rights.

“Do not legitimise them,” she said at a summit focused on girls’ education in Islamic nations being held in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad.

“As Muslim leaders, now is the time to raise your voices, use your power. You can show true leadership. You can show true Islam,” said 27-year-old Yousafzai.

The two-day conference has brought together ministers and education officials from dozens of Muslim-majority countries, backed by the Muslim World League (MWL).

Since sweeping back to power in 2021, the Taliban government has imposed an austere version of Islamic law that the United Nations has labelled “gender apartheid”.

Afghanistan is the only country in the world where girls are banned from secondary school and university.

Delegates from Afghanistan’s Taliban government did not attend the event despite being invited, Pakistan Education Minister Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui told AFP on Saturday.

“Simply put, the Taliban do not see women as human beings,” Yousafzai told the conference. “They cloak their crimes in cultural and religious justification.”

Muhammad al-Issa, a Saudi cleric and MWL secretary general, on Saturday told the summit that “those who say that girls’ education is un-Islamic are wrong”.