Gaza children return to school as UNRWA reports loss of most classrooms

Children across Gaza returned to school this week for the start of a new academic year, though many found classrooms still scarred by war and short of basic supplies.

At a school in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip run by the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, some pupils sat on blankets on the floor because there were no desks. Others used old, damaged furniture that had survived the fighting.

UNRWA said more than 280,000 students are now attending its schools and educational tents. Tawfiq al-Hourani, who heads the agency's education programme, said it hoped to improve the learning environment and bring it back to the condition it was in three years ago.

He said UNRWA had 182 fully equipped schools three years ago, but has lost more than 95 percent of them. Those that remain, he added, are occupied by displaced people.

For some families, the first day brought a measure of routine after years of disruption. Asmaa Al-Hour, a mother with two children at school, said she found as normal an environment as was possible, with a morning assembly and a warm welcome from the administration.

Her son, she said, had been waiting since dawn to go to school, just as he had seen his siblings do. Her daughter in the fourth grade had attended classes for the first month, after spending the three years of the war wishing she could at least visit a school.

Schools began operating last November after the October ceasefire, but the education system remains under severe strain. Some buildings are still damaged, while others have been used as shelters for displaced families.

According to UNICEF, about 700,000 children aged 4 to 17 in Gaza had missed formal in-person schooling for almost three years as of April, and about 420,000 had no face-to-face learning at all since October 2023.