The Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (GCPEA) has published Education Under Attack 2026, its flagship biennial report, documenting at least 8,566 attacks on education and the military use of schools and universities during 2024 — a figure that represents more than a 40% increase compared to the 2022–2023 reporting cycle.

The headline number lands in a report that also tracks a near-20% rise in attacks and military use of educational facilities over the most recent two-year period, according to Education Cannot Wait. The two figures are not redundant: the 40%-plus increase captures the raw volume jump in verified incidents during a single year, while the 20% figure reflects the broader trend line across the full reporting window. Both move in the same direction.

The three countries generating the highest incident counts were Palestine, Ukraine, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, per a ReliefWeb summary published in June 2024. Each conflict context is structurally distinct. In Gaza and the West Bank, the intensity of kinetic operations in densely populated areas with high concentrations of school infrastructure has driven the Palestinian figures. Ukraine's numbers reflect the sustained air campaign targeting civilian infrastructure, in which schools have been among the most consistently struck categories of buildings. The DRC's contribution to the global total is dispersed across multiple active fronts — GCPEA's underlying dataset, covering 2020 through 2023, logged over 1,000 reports from DRC alone, with particularly significant concentrations in Ituri, North Kivu, Mai-Ndombe, and Tanganyika provinces, according to the TRACE Data Portal.

The methodology behind these figures matters for anyone using them in policy or advocacy contexts. GCPEA's Attacks on Education dataset draws on a verified-incident framework that requires corroboration before an event is logged — meaning the actual frequency of attacks almost certainly exceeds what the dataset captures. Verified figures in conflict monitoring are a floor, not a ceiling.

That methodological conservatism makes the 40%-plus jump harder to dismiss as a counting artifact. Expanded reporting networks, improved open-source verification tools, and increased NGO presence in conflict zones all contribute to higher detection rates over time. But the scale of the increase — and its concentration in three of the world's most heavily documented conflict environments — points to a genuine intensification of harm to education systems, not merely better bookkeeping.

The military use dimension of the report is analytically separate from direct attacks. Schools and universities occupied by armed forces or non-state groups lose their protected status under international humanitarian law and frequently become targets themselves, creating a compounding dynamic. The Safe Schools Declaration, the voluntary political commitment to which over 120 states have now endorsed, explicitly addresses this practice — but non-signatories and non-state armed groups operating in DRC, Gaza, and eastern Ukraine are either outside that framework or functionally unconstrained by it.

What the Education Under Attack 2026 data reinforce is the structural vulnerability of educational infrastructure during protracted conflict: schools are fixed, known locations, often the largest public buildings in a community, and their destruction carries multiplier effects on child development, displacement, and long-term economic recovery that extend well beyond the immediate physical damage. For practitioners working on humanitarian response, development finance, or transitional justice, the GCPEA figures provide the baseline against which reconstruction needs and accountability claims will ultimately be measured.