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.
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 things now,” she said.
Hunger is constant. Parents sometimes send their children to the school tent just to distract them from their empty stomachs. “Do they focus? Of course not,” Alaa said with a weary smile.
In a humanitarian emergency, survival comes first. Palestine has one of the highest literacy rates in the world—98 percent. But now, education is necessarily a lower priority in Gaza than safety, food, water, and medical care. This hierarchy means that for many children here, classrooms have become little more than shelters from hunger, grief, and fear.
Classes in Gaza had only just started when the war began two years ago. Schools quickly became shelters for displaced families, mattresses crammed into classrooms where desks once stood. Many of these refuges have since been obliterated. As of this year, almost all of Gaza’s schools have been damaged or destroyed.
Last year the Palestinian Authority, based in Ramallah, in the West Bank, began offering “virtual schools” for children in Gaza, allowing them to register for online classes led by teachers in the West Bank. The curriculum was meant to make up for lost learning by condensing two academic years into one, having students focus on just the core content of each subject.
“On paper, it is a solution; in practice, it is nearly impossible,” Alaa said. Many kids don’t even have access to pens, let alone laptops or other devices that would allow them to attend virtual classes. Even when they do, electricity is scarce, internet connections are unreliable, and families are preoccupied with finding food, water, and shelter.
Alaa and other volunteers within the camp instruct children from grades one through 10. The younger kids are taught Arabic, math, and English; the older kids also learn science, physics, and chemistry. Alaa tries to follow the curriculum, but without reliable internet or other supplies, she is often forced to improvise.
Many of the children in her classes don’t even know what grade they should be in. “Before the war, I was supposed to be in first grade,” a young girl named Manal said. “Now … I don’t know. Maybe second. No, third.” Most of the third graders now struggle with basic reading and writing.
Ahmed and Mahmoud often arrive late. Their father was killed a couple months ago while trying to bring food home from an aid-distribution center. Aya, who lost her father during the third week of the war, brings her 4-year-old sister, Ameera, to class because there’s no one to look after her at home. Ghada’s brother also died early in the conflict. Manal’s father has been missing since November 2023, she told me; Israeli forces took him at the checkpoint while he and his family fled south from Gaza City. Alaa herself lost a brother in an Israeli air strike.
This is Alaa’s fourth school tent since the war began. For months, she taught out of the tent she was living in until she was able to find a separate one to use as a school—but then that tent and its replacement were destroyed by Israeli air strikes. The children are so used to the sound of strikes that they can tell whether they’re coming from a plane, a drone, or a ship. On the day I visited, Alaa was teaching math when the air filled with the low buzz of Israeli surveillance drones, followed by the thud of nearby explosions. The children flinched. Some looked toward the flap of the tent, ready to bolt. Usaid tried to reassure them. “Do not be afraid,” he said.
Alaa waited until the bombing stopped, and then resumed her lesson.
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