Hawzah News Agency –Israeli forces today attacked the staff and students of a school in Tuqu‘ town, east of Bethlehem city, according to official sources.

The Ministry of Education (MoE) said that a number of Israeli soldiers attempted to break into the campus of Tuqu‘ Secondary Boys School,l when they were stopped by the school staff.

Following a scuffle with the staff for preventing them from breaking into the school campus, the soldiers beat the teachers with riffle butts.

The school principal and a teacher were left with bruises on their bodies and faces.

The soldiers fired tear gas and concussion bombs inside the school, causing suffocation cases among dozens of students and staff.

MoE pointed that Tuqu‘ schools are a frequent target of Israeli military assaults, including opening gunfire towards the schools, obstructing students’ access to them and heavy military deployments in the surrounding area.

Attacks on education by Israeli military forces and Israeli settlers in the Palestine constitute grave violations of the right to education and development. These attacks are particularly prevalent in the most vulnerable areas of the West Bank – Area C, H2 and Jerusalem.

Israel has constructed a section of the apartheid wall near Tuqu‘, confiscating and isolating some 4,843 dunams of fertile land for colonial settlement activities and pushing the villagers into a crowded enclave, a ghetto, surrounded by walls, settlements and military installations.