CAIRO: The new school year in the Palestinian territories officially began on Monday, with all schools in Gaza shut after 11 months of conflict and no sign of a ceasefire.

As fighting continued, Israel announced new orders to residents of the north Gaza Strip to leave their homes. Umm Zaki’s son Moataz, 15, was supposed to begin 10th grade. Instead he woke up in their tent in Deir al Balah in central Gaza and was sent to fetch a container of water from more than a kilometre away.

“Usually, such a day would be a day of celebration, seeing the children in the new uniform, going to school, and dreaming of becoming doctors and engineers. Today all we hope is that the war ends before we lose any of them,” the mother of five said.

The Palestinian Education Ministry said all Gaza schools were shut and 90 per cent of them had been destroyed or damaged in Israel’s assault on the territory. The UN Palestinian aid agency UNRWA, which runs around half of Gaza’s schools, has turned as many of them as it can into emergency shelters housing thousands of displaced families.

90pc of educational centres in the besieged territory have been destroyed by Israel

“The longer the children stay out of school the more difficult it is for them to catch up on their lost learning and the more prone they are to becoming a lost generation, falling prey to exploitation including child marriage, child labour, and recruitment into armed groups,” UNRWA Director of Communications Juliette Touma said.

Nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been forced from their homes at least once, and some have had to flee as many as 10 times. In the latest evacuation order, Israel told residents of an area in the northern Gaza Strip they must leave their homes, following the firing of rockets into southern Israel the previous day.

The United Nations urged Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip to attend medical facilities to get children under the age of 10 years old vaccinated against polio.

Health officials said on Monday two separate Israeli airstrikes had killed seven people in central Gaza, while another strike killed one man in Khan Younis further south. The armed wings of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad said they retaliated against Israeli forces in several areas across the Gaza Strip with anti-tank rockets and mortar fire.

Published in Dawn, September 10th, 2024