How Israel’s strangulation of the West Bank is collapsing the Palestinian educational system
Israeli soldiers close a military checkpoint on Shuhada Street in Hebron’s Old City, preventing school students and residents from travelling, 6 October 2024
Jessica Buxbaum writes in Mondoweiss on 24 March 2026:
Over the last three weeks, the majority of Israeli students have been unable to attend classes amid the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. Yet for Palestinian students in the occupied West Bank, this has been the case for the last two years.
Under financial strain, the Palestinian Authority (PA), the West Bank’s governing body, has been paying only 60% of public school teachers’ salaries since October 2023 — resulting in schools operating just three days a week.
“Some of the students left the school because they got bored only going three days a week, so they just dropped out,” Aisha al-Khatib, a school principal in Nablus, said. “Some of them are working, selling things on the streets.”
While grades 1-10 are mandatory under PA law, secondary education is not. Coupling this regulation with a minimum working age of 15, child labor can often become a desirable alternative when significant barriers to education are in place. Yet the PA has limited control over its enforcement of child labor laws in the West Bank, since it only has administrative authority over less than 40% of the West Bank, known as Areas A and B per the 1993 Oslo Accords. The remaining 60% is classified as Area C, falling under direct Israeli military control.
Since 2019, Israel has withheld nearly NIS 8 billion (about $2.3 billion) in tax revenue owed to the PA for compensating families of Palestinian prisoners and Palestinians killed by Israeli forces. Under the Accords, Israel’s Finance Ministry collects tax revenue on the PA’s behalf and transfers the funds monthly.
Without these so-called “clearing funds,” the PA has been forced to cut public-sector budgets, including education. Israel’s actions against Palestine’s financial system don’t just cripple the economy; it bleeds through every aspect of Palestinian life.
“Because the government is in a financial crisis, and the Palestinian people and the students are all under occupation, and they are all under an apartheid system, everything is targeted,” Sayel Jabareen, a Palestinian parent from Ramallah, told Mondoweiss. “The Israeli Finance Minister [Bezalel Smotrich] knows that not paying the clearance tax will lead to obstructing the work of the engineer, of the police, of the teachers — freezing the whole life.”