Back to School, in Gaza
When I was growing up, in northern Gaza, my parents took my siblings and me to a stationery store about a week before each school year started. I would pick out my favorite notebooks, pencils, sharpener, eraser, and ruler, and place them in my backpack. My parents also took us to the market, to buy jeans, shirts, shoes, socks, and a belt. The night before school began was the second most important day of my year, after Eid. I would lay out my outfit and backpack next to the mattress where I slept. Then I would tuck my new shoes under my pillow.
Most schools in Gaza are three- or four-story concrete structures with a U-shaped layout and a central courtyard for assemblies and recreation. My middle school, Al-Fakhoora School, in Jabalia Camp, was run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. It had two practical-arts rooms, where students could learn carpentry, blacksmithing, and metalworking. There was also a science lab, a computer lab, and a library. On the first day, my mother or father would accompany us while we found our classrooms and teachers. My favorite subjects were English and physical education.
Schools were where we accessed many public services. From birth until the age of fifteen, we received many of our vaccinations at UNRWA schools. I remember UNRWA teams performing comprehensive dental screenings at least twice. The agency also gave out new and used textbooks for free. (Students sometimes quarrelled over who got the new ones.) When we got home, our parents helped us fit the books with protective covers. After ninth grade, I began attending government schools, but for a year or two UNRWA continued to provide daily food rations to my younger siblings. I recall them returning home with things they hadn’t finished in class—a sandwich, yogurt, some fresh fruit, juice, nutrient-fortified milk.
In 2010, when I was eighteen, I started studying English-language teaching at the Islamic University of Gaza. As part of my field training, I signed up to be a student teacher at Al-Fakhoora. I was lucky to train under one of my former teachers. When UNRWA hired me as a teacher, in 2016, he became my colleague.
I cannot believe how much has changed in ten years. A few days ago, I asked Aya, my elder sister, what kind of an education her four children are getting back in Gaza. Her kids wake up at 6 A.M., she told me, and line up to collect water from a truck in the street. At eight, two of her sons leave for Afak School, in Jabalia, about twenty-five minutes away on foot. Their “school” is a big tent surrounded by bombed-out houses and mounds of rubble. Mostafa, her fourteen-year-old, told me that during the walk he sometimes hears Israeli gunfire and drops to the ground. “We get down on our bellies amid the debris in the street,” he told me. This is happening during a supposed ceasefire.
Students attend school only three days a week, for three hours each day—a total of nine hours each week. I, by contrast, was in school twenty-seven hours a week. Teachers now rely on worksheets, because there are no textbooks. “Three hours, every other day, does not address children’s severe learning loss over the past three years,” Aya told me. The students have been through trauma for which there is little support. Those whose parents have been killed or detained often bear responsibility for their surviving family members, and some of them cannot attend school at all.
School supplies have become unbearably costly, Aya told me. New backpacks used to cost about ten dollars; now they cost forty. At the start of this school year, Aya’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Naheda, asked for a spiral notebook. It cost twenty-two shekels—more than seven U.S. dollars. “I couldn’t afford it,” Aya told me. “I began to cook less for my family, because I had to spend most of my money on school supplies.” Naheda attends tenth grade in a tent pitched in a school courtyard. “They don’t study in a classroom, because all of the classrooms are inhabited by displaced families,” my sister said.
Aya also has a stepdaughter, Dana, who is nineteen and starting her first year of college. Dana enrolled at Gaza University for a diploma in legal-secretarial studies, but her university building is likewise full of displaced families. Dana’s courses will be held online, but many of them require equipment that she does not have at home. “Dana will learn how to print and use a computer just by watching on her phone screen as a lecturer demonstrates it,” Aya said.
During our conversation, Aya asked me for the first time if I could help her family leave Gaza. “My kids need to learn drawing, painting, music, sports,” she told me. “I want my children to have access to a normal schooling and a better life.”
On October 7, 2023, I was preparing to take my daughter Yaffa to Khalifa bin Zayed School, in Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza, the same school I attended for fourth grade, when Hamas and other military groups fired rockets from Gaza into Israel. Yaffa, who was carrying a pink-and-green school backpack and a matching lunchbox, screamed and covered her ears. My son Mostafa, who was three, was crying, too, but he tried to comfort her. I didn’t know it then, but that was the last day Yaffa would wear her school uniform. On October 12th, a day before our house was destroyed, I asked Yaffa and my other son, Yazzan, if they understood why they weren’t going to school. “We will die,” they said. “We are scared.” We soon moved into a shelter in a girl’s school. Israeli bombs kept falling nearby.
In the weeks that followed, Israel decimated Jabalia, including the schools where I had studied and taught. Al-Fakhoora School became an UNRWA shelter, but on November 4th Israeli forces hit it with an air strike, killing fifteen people and wounding seventy. Two weeks later, a second air strike at the school killed at least fifty people. In the aftermath, the Israeli military told the New York Times that it was “committed to international law including taking feasible steps to minimize harm to civilians.” I walked there and documented the destruction on my phone. At al-Fakhoora, a U.N. flag was still flying. I saw two classrooms where the windows and substantial parts of the walls were destroyed. One of them was my ninth-grade classroom. A gate at the back of the school, which bore a sign that said “No Guns,” appeared to have been pierced by three pieces of shrapnel.
From there, I rushed to Tal Az Za’atar school, where many of my wife’s relatives were staying, and which had also been hit. Inside, I was relieved to find that my wife’s family had survived. But some of the slain people were our neighbors. Another neighbor, Khalid, had just left the school with his son Amr, who had cancer. Amr looked exhausted and frail, as though he had grown several years younger. I offered him a ride on my bike to another school turned shelter. Khalid was eventually killed in an Israeli strike. Amr would evacuate Gaza for medical treatment in Jordan, only to die, in January, 2025.
Israel’s attacks on schools, and on people sheltering in them, are not new. In 2009, two Israeli tank shells exploded immediately outside Al-Fakhoora, which was crowded with families fleeing an Israeli ground offensive. Shrapnel tore through the open school gates and grounds, killing forty-three people and injuring about a hundred and fifty. And I can vividly remember July 30, 2014, when Israel shelled a school in Jabalia camp that was serving as a shelter. My future wife, Maram, had taken shelter in the classroom next door. Fifteen people were slaughtered, including relatives of Maram, and some of her neighbors.
This time is different, though. This year is the fourth in a row in which Gaza’s children are being deprived of a fundamental human right. “Repeated bombardment, displacement, and the collapse of basic services have severed years of schooling, weakening core skills like reading, mathematics, memory retention, and structured study,” an independent U.N. commission said in a June, 2026, report. “Children in Gaza have effectively been ‘left behind’ even if they have been able to receive some informal learning in makeshift classrooms or online classes.” A UNICEF report warned that hundreds of thousands of children under five are at risk of “severe developmental delays because early childhood services have collapsed.”
I have tried to support some initiatives from afar, including one launched by a woman named Andera-Ghandi, the mother of my friend Husam. Andera-Ghandi founded one of the oldest kindergartens in Beit Lahia, but she has been displaced since October, 2023. Like almost every building in Beit Lahia, her kindergarten was destroyed. After taking shelter in Rafah, in southern Gaza, she opened a makeshift kindergarten in a tent. Later, when Israel attacked Rafah, she was displaced again, to Mawasi Khan Younis. There she opened a school, sponsored by UNICEF, that educated more than twenty-two hundred students, from kindergarten to high school.
This year, Andera-Ghandi opened a new school, called Athar—“impact”—in Gaza City. She told me that a UNICEF worker seemed reluctant to sponsor it, citing uncertainty and danger in Gaza City. Instead, she has collected individual donations to rent an apartment, pay for utilities and school supplies, and give teachers a monthly stipend of a hundred and fifty dollars. She has close to five hundred students, who attend classes free of charge.
I wonder how much children can learn in such devastating circumstances. Aya’s twelve-year-old son, who is also named Yazan, entered seventh grade this year, but he essentially missed fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. At school, her sons do not have access to chairs or desks, so they often sit on the dirt and work at a small table that is normally used for rolling dough. “One time, Mostafa used a brick as a desk,” Aya told me. Last winter destroyed thousands of tents in Gaza, soaking clothes, mattresses, and bedding, even as Save the Children reported that Israel was blocking critical aid such as tent poles, winter clothes, and blankets. Aya is bracing for another winter.
My family and I escaped Gaza in December, 2023, and ultimately moved to Syracuse, New York. This summer, my wife and I started a group chat to share details of our daily lives with family members in Gaza and in the diaspora. We filmed our children picking vegetables in the back yard. My mother, who evacuated Gaza in 2024, responded, “You’re bringing back sweet memories of the old days.” My father, who left Gaza in late 2025, described them as “old wounds.” He joked that next year we could lease our back yard to a farmer and make some money. My three sisters are still in Gaza. Sometimes it takes them days to download our videos because of the poor connection.
Here in the United States, my three kids went back to school soon after Labor Day. Maram and I walked them there under beautiful trees, accompanied by a neighbor, the neighbor’s child, and their dog. I worried that I was being insensitive when I texted some photos to the group chat. One of my younger sisters has three children between four and nine. The other has a three-year-old. Nearly every time we talk, I ask them if they’re sending their children to one of those makeshift schools in tents. They still worry about their children being killed at school.
On April 9, 2026, half a year into the so-called ceasefire, a nine-year-old named Ritaj Rihan was at school in a tent when an Israeli bullet hit her in the mouth. Her fellow-students told Al Jazeera that she was near the front of the tent, waiting for a teacher to look at her work. The tent had been erected on the ruins of Abu Obayda ibn al-Jarrah Secondary School, where I completed twelfth grade.
When Rihan was shot, she was sitting close to my nephew Yazan. Later that day, when he was reunited with my sister Aya, he told her, “Mum, a girl next to me was shot in the jaw.” He tried to reassure her by adding, “But she was still breathing.” What he did not know is that, by the time an animal-drawn cart could carry her to a medical clinic, she was dead.
The day after Rihan was killed, I found a photograph of her notebook online. In a cruel coincidence, she had been learning subtraction in her math class. She had also been practicing how to write several Arabic words: تفاحة (apple), موز (banana), and برتقالة (orange). One of the last things that Rihan wrote in her notebook was “Our village is clean.” Her blood was all over the page. ♦