Israel Demolishes Birzeit University Martyrs' Monument, Replacing It With Fig Sapling as Palestinians Vow Memory Will Endure

Israeli military forces raided Birzeit University near Ramallah before dawn on Monday, demolishing a stone memorial honoring students and alumni killed by Israel and removing the marble pillar that bore their names. The operation, carried out with a bulldozer and accompanied by ten military vehicles, marks the fifth Israeli incursion onto the campus since the start of 2026 and the 28th since 2002, according to university officials.

The destroyed structure, known as the Martyrs' Monument, had stood on the campus since it was erected between 1994 and 1996. It listed the names of 38 students and alumni killed by Israeli forces over the decades. Soldiers removed the stone and left behind a planter containing a fig sapling with an inscription reading, "Water it twice." The symbolism was not lost on those who gathered at the site in the aftermath — a fruit tree planted where a memorial to the dead had stood.

For Rania Washaha, 47, the demolition reopened a wound that had never fully healed. Her brother, Fadi, was 34 years old when he was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier near the northern entrance to el-Bireh in the central West Bank in May 2021. His name was among those inscribed on the stone pillar. Speaking near the site of the destroyed memorial, Washaha held her brother's photograph, describing the pain of bereavement returning with fresh force.

The university administration issued a statement condemning the raid, characterizing the destruction as a violation of international law and an assault on both education and national memory. "Bulldozers won't erase the memory of the martyrs, military vehicles won't extinguish the light of knowledge, and these assaults won't break the university's resolve to pursue its academic and national mission," the statement pledged.

The raid came ten days after another Israeli incursion during daylight hours, which occurred just one day before the start of the new fall semester. Nardeen al-Memi, the university's public relations and media officer, told Al Jazeera that during that earlier brief incursion, Israeli soldiers approached the monument for the first time and photographed it — an act that now appears to have been reconnaissance for Monday's demolition.

The monument's history reflects the broader trajectory of Palestinian loss. The first name inscribed on it was that of Sharaf al-Tayyibi, who was shot dead by Israeli forces on campus in 1984. Over the years that followed, more names were added. The most recent was that of student Omar al-Naasan, killed by soldiers in al-Mughayyir east of Ramallah on September 2 while confronting settler incursions. Days after his death, his father came to the university and personally wrote his son's name on the monument.

On Tuesday afternoon, students organized a protest at the site of the destroyed memorial. Many described the demolition as an Israeli attempt to intimidate them and suppress political activity on campus. Sami Adel, a Birzeit student who requested a pseudonym due to fear of detention, said the memorial holds a place in the heart of everyone who has attended the university since the 1990s. He added that soldiers had detained him for several hours three weeks earlier and threatened him with long and harsh detention if he participated in any political student activity on campus.

The destruction of the Birzeit memorial is part of what analysts describe as a broader Israeli policy targeting monuments dedicated to Palestinians killed by Israel in the occupied West Bank. The Israeli far-right has made the removal of such memorials part of its campaign to erase markers of Palestinian identity. In August, Zvi Sukkot, a member of the Knesset from the Religious Zionism Party, destroyed one such memorial in the village of Madama, south of Nablus, using a sledgehammer. The Israeli military later stated that it routinely removes what it calls "symbols of incitement."

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich submitted a list of approximately 40 Palestinian memorials to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, proposing their destruction. The targeting of civic and cultural symbols has been particularly intense in Jenin, where the "Jenin Horse" — a monument constructed from the wreckage left behind by an Israeli incursion into the city — was removed. A memorial dedicated to Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in Jenin was also targeted in 2023. Additionally, a cemetery in Jenin containing the bodies of Iraqi soldiers killed during the 1948 war has been raided by Israelis from illegal settlements.

The demolition at Birzeit has drawn attention to the systematic nature of these operations. The university, one of the most prominent institutions of higher learning in the West Bank, has long been a symbol of Palestinian academic and national life. Each incursion onto its campus represents not only a physical intrusion but an attempt to sever the connection between education and collective memory. The Martyrs' Monument was not merely a list of names — it was a site of commemoration, a place where families like the Washahas could find some measure of acknowledgment for their loss.

In the days since the demolition, students have gathered at the site to rewrite the names of the martyrs that had been inscribed on the memorial. Their act of reconstruction, however temporary, underscores the central tension the raid was meant to resolve: the belief among Palestinians that memory cannot be bulldozed, that names written in stone can be written again in ink, in protest, in the collective consciousness of a community that refuses to forget.

The fig sapling left in place of the monument remains, its instruction to "water it twice" a cryptic message that Palestinians have interpreted in various ways. Some see it as a taunt, others as an attempt to replace a memorial of death with a symbol of life in a gesture that erases rather than honors. For the families of the 38 students and alumni whose names once stood on that pillar, the sapling is not a replacement but a reminder of what was taken.