Israel Demolishes Birzeit University Martyrs' Memorial, Replacing It With Fig Sapling as West Bank Memorial Crackdown Widens

Israeli military forces raided Birzeit University near Ramallah before dawn on Monday, bulldozing a stone monument honoring students and alumni killed by Israel and hauling away the marble plaque that bore their names. The pre-dawn operation, carried out with 10 military vehicles, left behind a planter holding a fig sapling inscribed with the instruction "Water it twice" — a gesture that critics say was intended as mockery rather than reconciliation.

The destroyed structure, known as the Martyrs' Monument, had stood on campus since it was erected between 1994 and 1996. It listed 38 names of Birzeit students killed by Israeli forces, beginning with Sharaf al-Tayyibi, who was shot dead on the campus itself in 1984. Names were added over the decades as more students and graduates died, and the most recent inscription honored Omar al-Naasan, killed by soldiers in al-Mughayyir, east of Ramallah, on September 2 while confronting settler incursions. According to the university's public relations and media officer, Nardeen al-Memi, al-Naasan's father came to the campus days after his son's death and personally wrote the name onto the stone.

For Rania Washaha, 47, the demolition reopened a wound she has carried since May 2021, when her brother Fadi, 34, was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier near the northern entrance to el-Bireh in the central West Bank. Fadi's name was among those on the pillar. Al-Memi told Al Jazeera that during a separate incursion just 10 days earlier, soldiers approached the monument for the first time and photographed it — an act that now appears to have been preparation for its removal.

The university administration issued a statement condemning the raid 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. Students responded by rewriting the names of the martyrs on the site where the memorial had stood, and on Tuesday afternoon they organized a protest there.

Monday's raid marked the fifth Israeli incursion onto the Birzeit campus since the start of 2026 and the 28th since 2002, underscoring how routine such operations have become. The timing was also significant: it came only a day before the new fall semester began, following a daytime raid 10 days earlier. Sami Adel, a Birzeit student who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of detention, said the memorial occupies a cherished place in the hearts of everyone who has attended the university since the 1990s. He added that soldiers had detained him for several hours three weeks earlier and warned him that any participation in political student activity on campus would result in a long and harsh detention.

The removal of the Birzeit monument fits what observers describe as a broader Israeli campaign against memorials dedicated to Palestinians killed by Israel across the occupied West Bank. The Israeli far right has embraced the issue as part of its effort to erase markers of Palestinian identity. In August, Zvi Sukkot, a Knesset member from the Religious Zionism Party, destroyed a similar memorial in the village of Madama, south of Nablus, using a sledgehammer. The Israeli military later said it routinely removes what it calls "symbols of incitement" — language that critics argue is applied almost exclusively to Palestinian commemorative sites.

The campaign has reached the highest levels of government. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich submitted a list of approximately 40 Palestinian memorials to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, proposing their destruction. The targeting has extended beyond universities to civic and cultural symbols throughout the West Bank, particularly in Jenin. The "Jenin Horse," a monument constructed from the wreckage of an Israeli incursion into the city, was removed. A memorial in Jenin dedicated to Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh 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.

Palestinians and rights advocates argue that these actions are not isolated security measures but a systematic attempt to sever Palestinians from their collective memory and history. Memorials like the one at Birzeit serve as repositories of community grief and resilience, and their destruction is experienced as a second loss for families who have already lost loved ones. The fig sapling left in place of the stone pillar has been widely interpreted not as a gesture of renewal but as a symbol of substitution — an attempt to rewrite the narrative of the campus with something benign and apolitical while the original memory is carried away in a military vehicle.

The Birzeit administration has framed the raid as an attack on learning itself, noting that the destruction occurred as students prepared to return to classes. University officials and students say the fig sapling and its inscription "Water it twice" only deepened the insult. As students rewrote the martyrs' names by hand where the monument once stood, they made clear that the physical destruction of the memorial had not achieved its intended effect. The names, they insisted, remain inscribed in the memory of the university community — even if the marble that carried them has been taken away.