LONDON: For the third consecutive year, as students elsewhere grab their backpacks and return to class, children in Gaza carry what little they have left, fleeing from one danger zone to another, their futures uncertain.
Some 660,000 school-age children in Gaza have been deprived of formal education since Oct. 7, 2023, when a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel triggered Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza, according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.
For most Gazan families, survival has eclipsed every other concern. “Families have been uprooted 10, even 15 times. Their main focus is on food, water, clothing and sleep,” Issa Saaba, director of the Canaan Institute of New Pedagogy in Gaza, told Arab News.
More than 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents have been displaced multiple times, forced to seek shelter in tents, UNRWA schools, and hospitals — almost all of which have suffered some form of war damage.
Yet amid the devastation, Gaza’s children continue to cling to whatever schooling they can get. “Health and education have never been abandoned,” Saaba said.
