Gaza's School Year Opens: 700,000 Children Return to Tents and Rubble as 97% of School Buildings Remain Unusable

Since the ceasefire took hold and displacement numbers began stabilizing across Gaza, the strip's education system has reached a new milestone: its first full school year since the war began three years ago. Teachers and administrators returned to their posts on September 16, and students began showing up September 19, according to Gaza's Ministry of Education and UNRWA.

The scale of the challenge is stark. Around 700,000 school-age children live in Gaza, but the Ministry of Education says its plan can only reach about 350,000 this year, up from roughly 270,000 last year, according to Ahmed Ayesh al-Najjar, the ministry's director general of public relations and media. UNRWA is running a parallel hybrid program targeting hundreds of thousands more.

Most of those students won't see a normal classroom. The Ministry of Education says about 97% of Gaza's educational buildings are out of service, either destroyed, damaged, or occupied as shelters for displaced families. Classes are being held in whatever space is available: usable school buildings, temporary learning centers, tents, and, where electricity and internet hold up, online platforms.

UNRWA spokesperson Adnan Abu Hasna said the agency opened 86 learning spaces at the start of the year and plans to expand in-person classes gradually as safety, staffing and basic services allow. Under UNRWA's model, covering grades one through nine, about 280,000 children are expected to learn remotely while just over 72,000 start in in-person classes, a number officials say could climb to nearly 100,000 if conditions improve. Students attending in person get four lessons a day, three days a week.

The ministry says the total number of operating schools and learning points will rise to about 320 this year from roughly 270 last year. Al-Najjar said the flexible plan exists because, in his words, children's right to education cannot wait for schools to be rebuilt.

Beyond physical space, the ministry is confronting years of accumulated learning loss. Teachers are being asked to diagnose each student's skill level and rebuild basics in Arabic, English, math and science, with accelerated learning programs planned for grades two through nine.

The Ministry of Education, which is run by Hamas's governing apparatus in Gaza, also says about 17,000 students and 770 education workers were killed during the war. That figure has not been independently verified and comes from the same Hamas-run authority reporting the enrollment and school-status numbers.

Al Jazeera's on-the-ground coverage of the first school day framed the return as bittersweet, reporting that parents' biggest fear is whether their kids will make it home alive, and separately described continuing violence by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the occupied West Bank as "pogroms." That characterization is Al Jazeera's own framing. None of the sources reviewed here include a response from the Israeli government or the IDF addressing that specific description or incident-level details.

A Sharp Dispute Over the Word 'Genocide'

Coverage of Gaza's devastation continues to split along a familiar fault line. Reports from Gaza's Ministry of Education and the Palestinian Information Center describe the war that damaged nearly every school in the strip as Israel's "genocidal war." That's a legal and moral characterization, not an agreed-upon fact.

David Harsanyi, writing for the Daily Signal, argues that framing is unsupported. He points to a UNICEF-led Nutrition SMART Survey that found acute malnutrition in Gaza at 0.5%, among the lowest rates in the region, and contrasts it with a May 2025 warning from UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher that 14,000 babies faced imminent death, a claim Harsanyi says was later clarified to mean 14,000 malnutrition cases among Gaza's roughly 1 million children over a full year, not babies dying within 48 hours. Harsanyi contends no court has found Israel guilty of genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention and that aid, including from the US-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, reached Palestinians in large volumes before the ceasefire.

Supporters of the genocide characterization would point to the scale of destruction cited by the ministry itself. 97% of school buildings are out of service and thousands of education workers are reported killed, presented as evidence the term isn't hyperbole. Neither claim is adjudicated by a court, and this reporting doesn't resolve that dispute. What's verifiable is narrower: three years of war left Gaza's school infrastructure almost entirely nonfunctional, and reconstruction hasn't started at any meaningful scale.

None of the sources reviewed here offer a timeline for rebuilding a single damaged school. Until one exists, Gaza's 2026-2027 school year will run out of tents, aid-pallet classrooms and Moodle logins for however many electricity and internet allow.