While Israeli kids near Gaza rejoice at return to school, parents remain ambivalent
More than 550 children start new school year at the Gil Rabin School in Sderot, where soldiers and police stand guard outside while staff and students dress in yellow for hostages
Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter
SDEROT — All was festive at the entrance to the Gil Rabin School in the southern Israeli city close to the Gaza border at 7:45 a.m. on Sunday, the first day of the new school year.
To the beat of darbuka drums, parents and excited children streamed onto a red carpet lined with balloons to be greeted by principal Idit Dayan and other teachers handing out yellow sweets with smiley faces.
Older children wearing fairy wings would later welcome the younger ones in the sports court as magical music streamed out of the amplifiers.
“I don’t know whether to be happy or not,” confided one teacher standing next to this reporter. Earlier in the morning, Israelis had woken up to shocking headlines identifying six hostages murdered by Hamas terrorists in Gaza just days before. The IDF located their bodies in Rafah and brought them back to Israel overnight for burial.
Soldiers along the street, police officers at the gate, and yellow T-shirts worn by staff and students in support of the hostages’ release reflected the grim reality that Israel is still at war and still mourning the 1,200 people slaughtered by Hamas gunmen on October 7. Israelis are also praying for the return of the 101 hostages still in the coastal enclave, many of them no longer alive.
In Sderot, a city of around 30,000 just 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) from the Gaza border, at least 50 civilians and 20 police officers were murdered on that black Saturday.
Ready to support students
At Gil Rabin, principal Dayan expected 555 students to turn up for class with only 10 still not returning to the city. She said the school was ready to support students struggling with emotional and other difficulties with a psychologist, two counselors, and a raft of therapeutic activities.
But it was meeting up with friends that seemed to be uppermost in children’s minds.
Going into fifth grade, Nevo said he was “happier than ever” to return to school. “They receive us so nicely,” he beamed.
Classmate Hadas noted that a few students were not yet back.
“They’re frightened, but it’s sad because it was fun when the whole class was together,” she said.
Following the Hamas attack, the government evacuated border communities, including those from Sderot, paying for their stays in hotels or apartments in different parts of Israel. There, children attended local or “pop-up” schools established by the Education Ministry.
In February, the IDF authorized a return to many communities, including Sderot. In March, the city’s schools reopened.
Mixed feelings
Parents dropping their children off at Gil Rabin on Sunday expressed a range of emotions.ok88
Kfir, who, like many other parents, preferred not to give his surname or be photographed, had just waved off two of his three children to second and sixth grade. A baby is still at home.
The family of five plus one grandmother returned to Sderot in March, he explained, having moved first to Kibbutz Nir David in the Jordan Valley, where there wasn’t enough room. They then moved to central Bat Yam, where acclimatization was hard, and onto Ashdod, a coastal city just under 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of Sderot. In Nir David and Bat Yam, they slept six to a room. The children’s education was disrupted with every move.
“It was hard for the children,” said Kfir. “Every time they made new friends, we had to leave.”
Zina, heavily pregnant, had just deposited children in school, her daughter entering second grade and her son seventh.
She and her family immigrated from the war-torn eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk a decade ago, arriving in the town just after the last major round of fighting between Israel and Hamas in 2014.
Asked to describe what she felt this morning, she responded, “Fear.”
The family was evacuated to a hotel in Rehovot while Zina’s husband resumed working at a factory in the southern town of Netivot, spending the weekdays there and returning to the hotel at weekends. Zina said she found it too hard to manage the children alone and returned to Sderot in February.
To date, her children have resisted her attempts to have them see a psychologist following the events of October 7, when gun-toting terrorists killed civilians in Sderot in their homes and on the streets. “The fears keep coming back,” she said, triggered by strange noises or certain traffic sounds.
“My husband says we can move somewhere else, but we moved 10 years ago,” she said, adding, “Besides, Sderot is really nice.”
Karine, who has lived in Sderot since the age of six and had just dropped her daughter Romi off in first grade, also returned in February, sick of living in a hotel in Eilat on Israel’s southernmost point.
“The kids asked to come back,” she said (she has another child in kindergarten), “and we understood that the war was going to go on for a long time.”
Karine said she didn’t believe Israel would secure complete victory against Hamas, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged.
“How long will any victory last? A few months, a year? There will be more rounds” of fighting, she said.
“We thought about moving. But the children want to stay, and we have family here. They don’t know what happened here on October 7. We hid it from them. They know what to do when there’s a siren, to run into the protected room. That’s their life.”
She added, “It’s fate that we’re staying here. At least for the time being.”
