'We no longer know what a school looks like': Gaza's students will go a third year without classrooms

On 8 September, classrooms across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem will reopen, marking the start of a new academic year. For students there, despite financial hardships and shortages, the ritual of returning to school will continue.

But in Gaza, for the third consecutive year, no bells will ring. There will be no lines of students in fresh uniforms, no chatter of first-day nerves, no teachers welcoming pupils back.

Instead, children remain in tents, ruins, and overcrowded shelters—locked out of education by a war that has lasted nearly two years and shows no sign of ending.

A school year that never arrives

In a tent pitched near Gaza City's destroyed main road, Aisha Ahmed, 10, used to mark the date of her first day back to school every September with excitement.

This year, the day will pass without ceremony. "I don't know what school looks like any more. I try to write my name, but sometimes I forget the letters. My mother says I will return one day, but when?" she remarked to The New Arab.

"War has not only destroyed our houses and schools but also destroyed our dreams of getting a better life and hopes for our future," she said.

Aisha was one of the most intelligent students at her school, and she aspires to become a teacher in the future. However, she is afraid that the Israeli army will kill her amid the ongoing war.

Across the war-torn coastal enclave, similar stories repeat. Hassan Abu Hasira, a 13-year-old student from Gaza City, was supposed to enter the eighth grade this year. Instead, he spends his days helping his father scavenge for wood to build makeshift furniture in their displacement camp.

"I wanted to study engineering. Now I just carry wood and wait. When the war started, my dream stopped. My friends are scattered, some dead, some missing. I can’t even remember the last proper lesson I had," he told TNA.

"Because of the war, I have lost my hope to be a good person in the future and even lost my hope to survive someday," he said.

Like all students in Gaza, Aisha and Hassan are forced to move from one place to another with their families to escape the Israeli attacks.

"We are tired and frustrated because we are not protected from the Israeli attacks," Hassan said, adding that "I feel that we need many years before returning to our normal lives, and then I will become older without being an educated person," he lamented.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Education, more than 17,000 students and over 1,200 university students have been killed by Israel since October 2023. Nearly 90 per cent of Gaza's schools are either destroyed or heavily damaged, and those still standing are overcrowded with displaced families.

"The war has created what we can only describe as an erased future," Rami Khalaf, a Ramallah-based education researcher, told TNA.

"You cannot bomb schools, kill students and teachers, and then expect a society to rebuild itself. Education is the backbone of recovery. In Gaza, that backbone is shattered," Khalaf said.

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has warned of "losing an entire generation" of Palestinian children to war and displacement, noting that thousands who should now be in their second or third year of primary school have never learned to read or write.

Parents and teachers on the edge

Parents in Gaza fear their children are slipping into illiteracy. "My youngest daughter was supposed to learn the alphabet this year," Sami Abu Mustafa, a Palestinian father from al-Zawaida town in the central Gaza Strip, told TNA.

"Instead, she asks me to teach her, but I cannot. I never finished school myself. I fear she will grow up like me, unable to read a sign or write her name properly," he said.

Teachers, too, are struggling to hold on. Nadia Assaf, a displaced mathematics teacher in Khan Younis, organises small lessons in her tent using chalk and scraps of cardboard.

"We write numbers on old boxes, and I try to remind them of multiplication tables," she said. "But their minds are full of war. Some children cry when I mention school. Others cannot focus for more than a few minutes. Trauma and learning do not go together."

"When a child remembers how to add or write a word, I feel hope. But it is not enough. Tents are not schools, and cardboard is not a substitute for a blackboard. The world cannot expect children to learn like this," she added.

Education in Palestine is under attack in more ways than one. In the occupied West Bank, where schools are scheduled to reopen on 8 September, the new academic year itself is under strain.

Israel's withholding of clearance revenues has triggered a severe financial crisis, leaving teachers unpaid for months and reducing schools to the bare minimum.

"This is not just about Gaza's destruction. It is a broader strategy of disempowerment. Depriving Palestinians of education means depriving them of the ability to resist, imagine, and rebuild. Education is not collateral damage; it is a target," Hussam al-Dajani, a Palestinian political analyst from Gaza City, told TNA.

"The combined effect is devastating. Gaza is bombed into illiteracy, while the West Bank is strangled financially. Together, they create a landscape where Palestinian children are left without the means to learn, grow, or plan for the future," he said.

Despite the overwhleming despair, there is also defiance. In displacement camps, some students still carry their empty school bags, refusing to let go of a symbol of their normal lives. Teachers insist on reciting the alphabet in sand, and parents keep telling their children that one day, classrooms will open again.

"Education is our resistance against the unfair life we have now," Samiha Ayoub, a Gaza-based Palestinian teacher, told TNA.

 "Every letter we write in the sand is a message to the world: we are still here, we still want to learn, and we will not let war erase us," she concluded.