Palestinian teacher Hadeel Jurob has set up a school in El-Arish, a coastal city in Egypt’s North Sinai, for children displaced from war-torn Gaza. About 400 of the hundreds of children who fled Gaza to Egypt now study there.
El-Arish lies about 44km from the Gaza border, a city of mostly low buildings and dusty streets. Jurob started the school because there was no schooling for the displaced children. “There were no schools or education for these children who fled to Egypt,” she told AFP.
Jurob, who is in her thirties, is also a victim of the war. She left Gaza with her family about six months after Israel’s military offensive began following Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023, and settled in El-Arish, a key hub for sending aid into Gaza and evacuating patients for treatment. Like many Palestinian families near the border, hers has relatives on both sides, and they started a new life with their help.
She began teaching a small number of children in a rented building with a few other displaced Palestinian teachers, and the effort grew into a full, free school. It now has about 400 pupils aged six to 18, up from about 150 in its first year. As numbers have grown, so have costs; Egypt’s large charity Misr El Kheir Foundation now helps pay the rent and for materials, Jurob said.
It is the only Palestinian school in North Sinai, one of Egypt’s remotest and poorest regions, where security forces fought armed militant groups for years after the 2011 uprising.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report