Pupils sitting cross-legged on the sand take classes in a tent near Khan Younis in Gaza. Two sisters connect online to a West Bank school from Cairo. A professor in Germany helps Palestinian students link up with European universities.

After watching their schools and universities be closed, damaged or destroyed in more than seven months of onslaught, Gazans sheltering inside and outside the territory are doing what they can to restart some learning.

“We are receiving students, and we have a very large number of them still waiting,” said Asmaa al-Astal, a volunteer teacher at the tent school near the coast in al-Mawasi, which opened in late April.

Instead of letting children lose a whole year of schooling as they cower from Israeli bombardment, “we will be with them, we will bring them here, and we will teach them,” she said.

Gaza and the occupied West Bank have internationally high literacy levels, but Israel’s blockade of the coastal Palestinian enclave and repeated rounds of conflict left education fragile and under-resourced.

Read the full story by Reuters here