The new school year in Gaza begins in tents
Tareq S. Hajjaj reports in Mondoweiss on 17 September 2026:
Khaled Oweis, 37, walks through the markets with his two sons, eight-year-old Munther and 11-year-old Hassan, searching for what they need to begin the new school year: backpacks, uniforms, notebooks, and a few basic supplies.
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“I walk through the markets, but whenever I find what my children need, I am shocked by the prices,” Oweis said. “By my calculations, buying the basic supplies for each of my two sons would cost more than 250 shekels ($80). Before the war, it cost less than 100 shekels ($30).”
The 2026–2027 academic year in Palestine is scheduled to begin on September 19. While Palestinian children elsewhere will return to school buildings, many children in Gaza will return to educational tents — if they return at all.
More than 97 percent of schools in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed since October 2023, according to UNICEF figures, leaving around 658,000 school-age children without access to formal education. Gaza’s school system — one of the most developed in the Arab world before the war, with a literacy rate consistently above 97 percent — has been systematically dismantled.
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More than 85 percent of Gaza’s government educational buildings have either been destroyed or rendered inaccessible, according to Ibrahim Ramadan, director of the Ministry of Education’s Khan Younis department. Many of the schools that survived the war sit behind the Israeli-controlled “Yellow Line,” which divides the Strip and blocks Palestinian students from reaching them.