"They Bomb Us Because They Don't Want Us To Be Well-Educated"

Isn't it interesting that both Israel and Hamas have the same targets for destruction in Gaza?

Israel promised cruel revenge for Hamas rocket attacks, and they delivered it upon the children of Gaza with a psychotic zeal. Even English-speaking, American-funded schools, that allowed boys and girls to be taught side by side, were not safe from the F-16s and the bulldozers :

When President George W. Bush visited the West Bank a year ago, Palestinian militants in Gaza vented their anger by ransacking the American International School here, smashing windows, stealing computers and torching a small fleet of buses.

It was just the latest episode in a decade-long string of bombings, kidnappings and lootings at the elite private school, which isn't connected to the U.S. government but has an American-style curriculum and coed, English-only classrooms, which have made it a favorite target of Islamic extremists.

On Jan. 3, the school finally was destroyed, but not by Islamist extremists. An Israeli airstrike flattened the two-story building and sprayed shards of steel and stone over the manicured lawns and soccer field. The night watchman was killed. Books, computers, science equipment and art supplies were crushed beneath the wreckage.

Within moments, Gaza's perhaps most pro-Western institution — a symbol of possibility in a sealed-off, war-torn land — was gone.

The Israeli army told McClatchy that its forces hit the school because Hamas militants had launched rockets from the grounds. School officials and neighborhood residents rejected that explanation, however, saying that the hilltop campus offered few places to hide and that the militants themselves often had attacked the campus.

"It seems that targeting our school . . . was one of the very few things that fanatic groups and Israel could agree on," said Sharhabeel al Zaeem, a member of the school's board of directors.

...of the 25 schools and hospitals that Israeli forces hit during the 22-day war, according to a tally by Palestinian officials, only the American International School was destroyed. Days after the airstrike, Israeli bulldozers and tanks returned to the campus and plowed over the basketball court and the jungle gym, school officials and residents said.

In conservative Gaza, it was one of the only schools in which boys and girls sat side by side in classrooms, and older students even dared to date.

"This was not a base of terror," Zaeem said. "We are trying to bring the best education to Gaza."

Khalid Ghanan, a senior who's on a full academic scholarship, sat in his family's living room in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza one morning last week — a day he should have been in class — and cursed Israeli forces and Gaza militants.

"The militants are stupid. They're unhappy with this place because of the word 'American' and they don't even know what it's doing for the students," the poised 17-year-old said. "And Israel bombed us just because they don't want us to be well educated."

"It's really very sad to see Israel target a place that Gaza needs to reach a common understanding between cultures and promotes openness and diversity," Salem said. "We should have a hundred schools like ours in Gaza, not one."

Now they have none.