Back to School, in Gaza

On October 7, 2src23, 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, 2src25.

Israel’s attacks on schools, and on people sheltering in them, are not new. In 2srcsrc9, 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 3src, 2src14, 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, 2src26, 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.”