UN launches major drive to return hundreds of thousands of Gaza children to school

The United Nations announced on Tuesday a major push to get hundreds of thousands of children across war-scarred Gaza back to school.

Since the start of Israel's genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, nearly 90 percent of schools in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed and more than 700,000 school-aged children have been left unable to access formal education, according to the UN children's agency UNICEF.

"Almost two and a half years of attacks on Gaza's schooling have left an entire generation at risk," agency spokesperson James Elder told reporters in Geneva.

UNICEF was now dramatically scaling up its education initiative in the Palestinian territory, Elder said, in what he described as "one of the largest emergency learning efforts anywhere in the world".

The organisation currently supports more than 135,400 children receiving education at over 110 learning spaces in Gaza — many of them in tents, he said.

But it now aims to more than double that number to include more than 336,000 children this by the end of this year, and to get all school-age children back in in-person learning in 2027.

UNICEF is working on the project with the Palestinian education ministry and the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, which before the war was providing schooling to around half of Gaza's children.

UNICEF would need $86 million for its education programme in Gaza this year — "roughly what the world spends on coffee in an hour or two", Elder pointed out.

Getting children back to school "is not a 'nice to have'. It is an emergency", he insisted.

He highlighted that "before this war, Palestinians in Gaza had some of the highest literacy rates in the world".

"Today that legacy is under attack: schools, universities, and libraries have been destroyed, and years of progress erased," he said.

Elder also stressed that learning in Gaza was "lifesaving".

"These centres provide safe spaces in a territory that is often inaccessible and dangerous," he pointed out, adding that they also connect children to health, nutrition and protection services, as well as clean toilets and places to wash hands — "something too many children in shelters simply don't have".

The push to scale up access to education comes as aid groups have managed to bring more supplies into the besieged territory since a fragile US-backed ceasefire took effect last October.

UNICEF said that it had managed to bring in more than 4,400 recreational kits and 240 School-in-a-Carton kits, containing things like pencils, pens, chalk, exercise books, and geometry sets.

And it said it expected the total number of kits brought in to surpass 11,000 by the end of the week, with nearly 7,000 others in the pipeline for the coming weeks.