Israeli Soldiers Bulldoze Birzeit University's Martyrs' Monument, Leave Fig Sapling in Its Place

Soldiers reached the stone pillar first, photographing it before the bulldozer moved in. Within minutes at dawn on Monday, the Martyrs' Monument at Birzeit University near Ramallah was gone, its marble stone taken away by Israeli forces. In its place they left a planter holding a fig sapling, with an inscription reading "Water it twice."

The monument had carried 38 names, students and alumni of the university killed by Israeli forces since 1984, when Sharaf al-Tayyibi was shot dead on the campus itself. Names were added over three decades as more students and graduates were killed. The most recent addition was Omar al-Naasan, killed by soldiers on September 2 in al-Mughayyir, east of Ramallah, while confronting a settler incursion. According to Nardeen al-Memi, the university's public relations officer, al-Naasan's father came to the campus days after his son's death and wrote the name on the stone himself.

Rania Washaha, 47, learned of the demolition with the particular grief of someone who already knew the monument by heart. Her brother Fadi, 34, was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier near the northern entrance to el-Bireh in May 2021. His name was on the pillar.

The raid involved ten military vehicles and a bulldozer, according to the university administration, and came ten days after a separate daytime incursion onto the campus the day before the fall semester began. University officials count it as the fifth Israeli incursion onto Birzeit's campus since the start of 2026, and the 28th since 2002.

Birzeit's administration issued a formal condemnation, calling the demolition a violation of international law and an attack on 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."

Students gathered at the site of the destroyed memorial on Tuesday afternoon in protest. One student, who asked to be identified by the pseudonym Sami Adel out of fear of detention, told Al Jazeera that soldiers had detained him for several hours three weeks earlier and warned him he would face "long and harsh detention" if he took part in any political student activity on campus.

The demolition fits a pattern extending well beyond Birzeit. In August, Knesset member Zvi Sukkot of the Religious Zionism Party destroyed a Palestinian memorial in the village of Madama, south of Nablus, with a sledgehammer; the Israeli military said afterward that it routinely removes what it calls "symbols of incitement." Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has submitted a list of roughly 40 Palestinian memorials to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposing their destruction.

In Jenin, a monument built from the wreckage of a past Israeli incursion, known as the "Jenin Horse," has been removed, and a memorial to Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was targeted in 2023. A cemetery holding the remains of Iraqi soldiers killed in the 1948 war has reportedly been raided by settlers from nearby outposts, and other local landmarks have also come under attack, according to Al Jazeera's reporting.