A new school year has begun in the Gaza Strip after three years of closure. Because of the vast destruction of the war, however, most pupils cannot return to ordinary classrooms. With school buildings destroyed or damaged, temporary tent classrooms have been set up for about 500,000 pupils. Pupils were seen taking lessons in these tents in Gaza City on Saturday.
According to the Palestinian ministry of education and higher education, about 700 tents have been put up across the Gaza Strip. These temporary centres teach pupils whose regular schools have been damaged or destroyed in the war or turned into shelters for displaced people. There are about 541,000 pupils in Gaza this school year.
The education ministry said teaching in the new school year is running in two ways, in person in classrooms and online. Online teaching has been arranged for those inside Gaza who cannot attend in person and for pupils outside the territory. About 70,000 pupils will join online from inside Gaza and 20,000 from outside.
In-person teaching remains the main method, however. About 700 teaching centres have been prepared for pupils in various areas, and the Palestinian education ministry said another 25 temporary schools would open shortly. The start of the new school year was also delayed by severe heat as well as by the need to teach in tents and temporary structures.
Gaza’s education system was comparatively strong before the war. The situation has changed completely since the war that began in October 2023. The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said about 92 percent of Gaza’s school buildings have been wholly or partly destroyed. About 658,000 children have been deprived of proper education.
The war has not only damaged school buildings; the amount of teaching time has also fallen sharply. Between 2023 and 2026 the Palestinian education ministry’s normal 200 teaching days a year fell to about 60. Weekly class hours also fell from 30 to 12.
Education ministry officials say the aim in the present situation is not simply to rebuild schools but to create an education system that can also make up the learning lost because of the war. A “flexible education system” combining temporary centres, tents, partly usable schools and online teaching has been introduced for that purpose.
Making up the pupils’ lost learning has become the major challenge for teachers and education specialists. Omar Dahlan, a specialist in education and education in emergencies at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza, believes children’s basic capacity to learn has been damaged by long separation from a stable educational environment. In his view, rather than simply racing through the old syllabus, it is necessary to identify which basic skills pupils have lost and to make those up separately.
The temporary classrooms have their own limitations. At Al-Hadara school in Gaza, pupils have classes in small tents in two shifts and many study sitting on the floor. There are also shortages of benches and chairs, books, exercise books, pens and other teaching materials.
Even so, the effort to bring pupils back into classrooms after a long interval is under way. Gaza’s new school year is therefore not simply the resumption of teaching; it has also become a picture of how an education system broken by war is trying to function again with limited resources.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report