0 views
Hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza have returned to in-person learning for the first time in nearly three years, filing into tent classrooms and makeshift learning centres for a school year that educators describe as part education, part emergency mental-health care.
About 540,000 students are expected to attend in-person classes this academic year in temporary facilities built from tents, tarpaulins, sheet metal and wood, according to education officials. UNICEF says it is supporting more than 330,000 children to return to learning this autumn, including through more than 200 learning centres across the Gaza Strip. One Gaza City complex of 20 specialised learning tents serves some 4,000 students in rotating shifts, three days a week, in an accelerated programme designed to recover lost years.
The scale of destruction explains the improvisation. UNICEF says nearly 98 percent of Gaza's school buildings have been damaged or destroyed, and more than 93 percent of damaged schools need major rehabilitation or complete rebuilding. Around 420,000 children had no face-to-face learning at all between October 2023 and the start of this school year.
In many classrooms there are no desks. Students sit on mattresses or blankets with a blackboard at the front, and some temporary sites still shelter displaced families alongside pupils. Families say the basics have become painfully expensive: a notebook that once cost three shekels now sells for 15, and uniforms, pens and bags are beyond the reach of many households that lost everything.
Children describe mixed feelings. Some say they are simply happy to see friends and teachers again after years of isolation. Others admit they are frightened — by memories of strikes, by the walk to school, by sitting in a tent with nothing between them and the sun but canvas. Teachers say attendance itself is a form of therapy: routine, play and learning give children structure after three years dominated by loss.
UNICEF frames the return to learning as one of the largest emergency education efforts in the world, and stresses that learning and mental health now go hand in hand. The agency's accelerated curriculum compresses missed material so that children who lost two or three grade levels have a path back into formal schooling.
The school year began on September 19 under the Palestinian Ministry of Education, backed by international and local organisations. Israeli forces remain in control of more than 60 percent of Gaza despite last year's ceasefire, which halted major fighting but did not end the conflict. Palestinian authorities say more than 73,000 people were killed in the war that followed the October 2023 attacks in southern Israel, in which about 1,200 people were killed.
Aid groups warn that the tent schools are a beginning, not a solution. Rebuilding hundreds of schools will take years, thousands of teachers need support and pay, and an entire generation carries trauma that no curriculum alone can fix. For now, though, the sound returning to Gaza's mornings is an ordinary one: children, calling out lessons, in rooms made of canvas.
Related reading: India Accuses Pakistan of Terrorism Double Standards at UN Over Azhar Bounty · Riyadh Airport Attack Kills Saudia Captain, Destroys Parked Jet · Navi Pillay Wins 2026 Nobel Peace Prize for Defending International Law
