The Martyrs’ Memorial at Birzeit University held the names of at least 38 Palestinian students and alumni killed by Israeli forces or settlers. On Monday morning, October 5, Israeli soldiers stormed the campus near Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, accompanied by a military bulldozer, demolished the stone monument and seized the site, the Palestinian news agency WAFA reported. They detained a member of the university’s security staff during the raid. In the memorial’s place, the soldiers left a fig sapling.
Writing for Al Jazeera, Fayha Shalash reports that the demolition forced at least one family to grieve twice. Rania Washaha, 47, watched soldiers remove a monument that carried her brother’s name. Fadi Washaha was 34 when an Israeli soldier shot him in the head near the northern entrance to el-Bireh, in the central West Bank, in May 2021. His sister said the raid brought the pain of that loss back.
Students at Birzeit, one of the West Bank’s leading universities, describe the demolition as one step in a broader campaign against Palestinian identity on campus, citing repeated raids, threats and restrictions on political activity. Birzeit has faced Israeli military incursions for years, but replacing the memorial with a living plant added a symbolic step to a physical one: not only removing the record of the dead, but planting over it.
The raid fits a measured pattern. Al Jazeera reports that Palestinians in the occupied territory have faced increased Israeli violence and discrimination since October 2023, with violence now rising ahead of Palestinian polls. The same Monday as the Birzeit demolition, Israeli troops opened fire on a vehicle carrying three Palestinians near Bani Naim, east of Hebron. The Israeli military said the car had rammed one of its vehicles. Palestinian officials said the shooting left one Palestinian dead and the other two seriously injured. Those are two different accounts of the same event — the army’s version explains the gunfire; it does not account for the casualty figures, which come from the Palestinian side.
Arrests ran in parallel. Anadolu Agency reported that Israeli forces detained 12 Palestinians, among them three children and two women, in raids across Ramallah, Bethlehem, Tubas and Nablus around the same period.
A memorial is cheap to destroy and cheap to rebuild; the Birzeit monument was demolished by one bulldozer in a morning raid. What cannot be rebuilt is what it marked — 38 names, each documented by the institution that lost them. The fig sapling the soldiers left behind will be the next thing Birzeit’s students have to decide what to do with.