Gaza approaches second year without schooling, with heavy cost for kids’ futures
Aid groups attempt ‘back to learning’ programs, but struggle to import school supplies as food and medicine take precedence
KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip — This week, when they would normally be going back to school, the Qudeh family’s children stumbled with armfuls of rubble they collected from a destroyed building to sell for use in building graves in the cemetery that is now their home in southern Gaza.
“Anyone our age in other countries is studying and learning,” said 14-year-old Ezz el-Din Qudeh, after he and his three siblings — the youngest a 4-year-old — hauled a load of concrete chunks. “We’re not. We’re working at something beyond our capacities. We are forced to in order to make a living.”
Schools have been closed in Gaza for almost a year, following the outbreak of war after the Hamas terror group’s October 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel, when thousands of terrorists burst through the border, killing 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. The ongoing war has devastated the enclave. Israel has stressed that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.
Amid the war, most of Gaza’s children are caught up helping their families in the daily struggle to survive.
Children trod barefoot on the dirt roads to carry water in plastic jerricans from distribution points to their families living in tent cities teeming with Palestinians driven from their homes. Others wait at charity kitchens with containers to bring back food.
Humanitarian workers say the extended deprivation of education threatens long-term damage to Gaza’s children. Younger children suffer in their cognitive, social and emotional development, and older children are at greater risk of being pulled into work or early marriage, said Tess Ingram, regional spokesperson for UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children.
“The longer a child is out of school, the more they are at risk of dropping out permanently and not returning,” she said.
Gaza’s 625,000 school-age children already missed out on almost an entire year of education. With languishing negotiations to halt fighting, it’s not known when they can return to classes.
Some 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.4 million people have been driven from their homes. They have crowded into the sprawling tent camps that lack water or sanitation systems, or UN and government schools now serving as shelters.
Kids have little choice but to help families
Mo’men Qudeh said that before the war, his kids enjoyed school. “They were outstanding students. We raised them well,” he said.
Now he, his four sons and his daughter live in a tent in a cemetery in Khan Younis after they had to flee their home in the eastern neighborhoods of the city. The kids get scared sleeping next to the graves of the dead, he said, but they have no alternative.
Every day at 7 a.m., Qudeh and his children start picking through rubble. On a recent day of work, the young kids stumbled off the pile of wreckage with what they found. Qudeh’s 4-year-old son balanced a chunk of concrete under his arm, his blonde curly hair covered in dust. Outside their tent, they crouched on the ground and pounded the concrete into powder.
On a good day, after hours of work, they make about 15 shekels ($4) selling the powder for use in constructing new graves.
Qudeh, who was injured in Israel’s 2014 war with Hamas, said he can’t do the heavy work alone.
“I cry for them when I see them with torn hands,” he said. At night, the exhausted children can’t sleep because of their aches and pain, he said. “They lie on their mattress like dead people,” he said.
Children are eager for a lost education
Aid groups have worked to set up educational alternatives — though the results have been limited as they wrestle with the flood of other needs.
UNICEF and other aid agencies are running 175 temporary learning centers, most set up since late May, that have served some 30,000 students, with about 1,200 volunteer teachers, Ingram said. They provide classes in literacy and numeracy as well as mental health and emotional development activities.
But she said they struggle to get supplies like pens, paper and books because they are not considered lifesaving priorities as aid groups struggle to get enough food and medicine into Gaza.
In August, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) began a “back to learning” program in 45 of its schools-turned-shelters that provide children activities like games, drama, arts, music and sports. The aim is to “give them some respite, a chance to reconnect with their friends and to simply be children,” spokesperson Juliette Touma said.
Education has long been a high priority among Palestinians. The territory has a 98% literacy rate, compared to neighboring Egypt, where only 71% of adults were literate in 2021, according to UNESCO statistics.
When she last visited Gaza in April, Ingram said children often told her they miss school, their friends and their teachers. While describing how much he wanted to go back to class, one boy abruptly stopped in panic and asked her, “I can go back, can’t I?”
“That was just heartbreaking to me,” she said.
