Story highlights

• Says will continue to call out Israel for violating human rights in Palestine
• PTV channel censored a portion of her speech which alluded to a mass deportation scheme
• ‘Simply put, the Taliban do not see women as human beings’

Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai lambasted on Sunday Israel and the interim Afghan Taliban government for running the girls’ education, reminding the Muslim world that mere statements would not suffice their agony.

“In Gaza, Israel has decimated the entire education system,” he said while addressing the international summit on ‘Girls’ Education in Muslim Communities’, in Islamabad.

“They have bombed all universities, destroyed 90% of schools, and indiscriminately attacked civilians sheltering in school buildings.”

The two-day summit, which focuses on the education of girls in Muslim-majority countries, aims to address the issue of millions of girls being out of school.

Malala, who has been criticised in the past for not promptly raising voice for Gazans, vowed to call out Israel’s violations of international law and human rights as Palestinian children have lost their lives and future.

“A Palestinian girl cannot have the future she deserves if her school is bombed and her family is killed,” she said and highlighted that girls are living under dire situations in Muslim Ummah in Yemen, Sudan, and many other countries.

Since sweeping back to power in 2021, the Taliban government has imposed an austere version of Islamic law that the United Nations has labelled “gender apartheid”.

Afghanistan is the only country in the world where girls are banned from secondary school and university.

Delegates from Afghanistan’s Taliban government did not attend the event despite being invited, Pakistan Education Minister Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui told AFP on Saturday.

‘Gender apartheid’

The youngest Nobel laureate described the Taliban government’s decisions in Afghanistan to bar girls from education as a part of ‘gender apartheid’

“For the past three and a half years, the Taliban have ripped away the right to learn from every Afghan girl. They have weaponised our faith our faith to justify it. The Taliban are explicit about their mission. They want to eliminate women and girls from every aspect of public life and erase them from society. They have created a system of gender apartheid. The Taliban have issued more than 100 laws to strip away women’s rights. Every basic freedom you can think of,” she said.

“Simply put, the Taliban do not see women as human beings,” Malala said and added that the interim government clocks women’s crimes in cultural and religious justification. But let us be clear there is nothing Islamic about this.“

The PTV channel censored a portion of her speech which alluded to a mass deportation scheme by Islamabad launched in 2023 that has seen hundreds of thousands of Afghan nationals leave under threat of arrest.

“I cannot imagine an Afghan girl or an Afghan woman being forced back into the system that denies her future,” she told the conference in remarks cut from the air.

Yousafzai was shot in the face by the Pakistani Taliban when she was a 15-year-old schoolgirl in 2012, amid her campaigning for female education rights.

Her activism earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, and she has since become a global advocate for women’s and girls’ education rights.

She urged scholars and leaders to raise their voices for women’s and girls’ education in Afghanistan. “The very loudest champions of their cause must be fellow Muslims.”

Malala urged the Muslim leaders to recognise the Taliban regime as “perpetrators of gender apartheid” and not legitimise it.

“Do not make compromises on our faith,” the rights activist said and called for holding the Taliban accountable for violation of the international law.

“It is time we have real tools to prevent an extremist regime from systematically erasing women and girls like the Taliban are doing.”

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She went on to add that the path forward for Afghanistan lies in political solutions instead of military force and in using the power of international and human rights to bring justice.

She reiterated that the Muslim world should denounce the Taliban’s oppressive laws. “We must be the narrators of our faith. We must speak for what Islam stands for which means looking at the situation of girls’ education in all Muslim countries.”

Malala also highlighted that there was a “tremendous amount of work” needed to be done in Pakistan where 12.5 million girls are out of school. She urged leaders to protect every girl’s right to go to school for a complete 12 years.