Back to School in Gaza

"In Gaza, as in much of the world, September usually means sharpened pencils, pressed uniforms, and the first day of class. This year, the month arrived with bombed-out buildings, new displacement orders, and worsening famine. At 10 on a hot Sunday morning in the southern city of Khan Younis, a teacher named Alaa Abu Sabt stood before a group of about 20 children. They were gathered in what everyone in their camp calls "the educational tent"-though the only signs that the structure was being used as a school were some pencils, stacks of loose paper, a single jar of crayons, and a blackboard, balanced precariously between two broken chairs."

""Let us wait a little more until the others come," Alaa told the children. That morning, a water truck from an aid organization had arrived, and most of the students had been busy waiting in line and hauling jerricans back to their tents. Some slipped into class late, dusty and out of breath. Alaa reminded a boy named Usaid to shake the sand from his sandals before stepping onto the thin sheet spread across the dirt floor. Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: Gaza's suffering is unprecedented The day I visited, to get the kids settled, Alaa began her class with drawing. She passed around paper and the jar of crayons-fragments of salvaged wax, some melted into odd shapes. Usaid lives in a tent with his parents, three siblings, and an uncle's family, but he sketched a house of colored squares where each child has their own room."

"The school has "no bathrooms, no water," Alaa told me. "When a child needs the bathroom, they have to run back to their tent." Alaa earns no salary for her teaching. She has reached out to aid groups for materials but met with little success. "I am in need of the basics," she told me-pens, paper, pencils. "But they are very expensive, if they can be found at all." No one has textbooks; backpacks are a rarity. "It feels like a luxury to even imagine those thing"

Children in Khan Younis attend classes in an improvised "educational tent" with minimal supplies and a precarious blackboard. The teacher, Alaa Abu Sabt, instructs about twenty pupils without pay while students wait for scarce water and run back to tents for bathroom needs. Classroom materials consist of salvaged crayons, loose paper, and a single jar of crayons. Many families live in crowded tents after displacement, and basic educational items like textbooks and backpacks are rare or unaffordable. Bombed-out buildings, new displacement orders, and worsening famine compound daily hardships and disrupt schooling and wellbeing.

Read at The Atlantic