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GAZA CITY—Thirteen-year-old Saida Abdullah stood in front of several dozen of her classmates gathered under sheets of tarp strung up among olive trees on a plot of farmland in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of northern Gaza City on Saturday. “Long live a free and Arab Palestine,” she cried out. “Glory and eternity to our righteous martyrs.” The children repeated the slogans after her and commenced a new school day at the Al-Karama School, one of a number of makeshift educational facilities established over the past several months in Gaza, where the schooling system has been decimated by Israel’s genocidal war.
The Al-Karama School, which accommodates 200 boys and girls and provides classes to children from four to 17 years old, lacks the most basic of educational resources. Students receive their lessons sitting on the ground in one of two tents or in the open air, without notebooks, desks, or a blackboard.
The director of the school, Ghadeer Odeh, told Drop Site News she founded the school after the so-called ceasefire in October 2025, “to fight the ignorance that has come to threaten a new generation of Palestinians in Gaza.”
Before the genocide, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank had one of the highest literacy rates in the world, reaching over 97% in 2020, despite Israel’s brutal occupation. Yet for nearly three years in a row now, close to 700,000 Palestinian children have been deprived of formal in-person schooling in Gaza, according to UNICEF. Nearly 98% of school buildings in Gaza were damaged and over 93% of them (526 out of 564) require major rehabilitation or full reconstruction to be functional again. Any classrooms that remain usable have been converted into displacement shelters.
Over the course of the war, some 20,000 school-age children and over 530 teachers in Gaza have been killed by Israel, according to Monir Abu Zaiter, the director of education in East Gaza. Tens of thousands more have been wounded, many with life-changing injuries. The “ceasefire” has not stopped the slaughter, with at least 300 children killed by Israel since the agreement came into effect in October, an average of one child killed every day. According to Abu Zaiter, some 19,500 students have also left Gaza since the beginning of the war.
“Beyond missed school days, the crisis is driving severe learning loss: without regular instruction and practice, children’s foundational literacy and numeracy skills are eroding, making it harder to re-enter schooling and progress at age-appropriate levels,” UNICEF said in an April report.
Amid the devastation, government-led educational initiatives, and community ones like Al-Karama School, are doing what they can to fill the void.
Saida Abdullah, 13, leads students in morning chants before the start of a school day at Al-Karama School in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of northern Gaza City on August 15, 2026. Video by Rasha Abou Jalal.
Al-Karama School
Soon after Israel launched its assault in October 2023, Odeh and her family were forced to leave their home in Gaza City. In the ensuing months, they were displaced 13 times—fleeing from different parts of the Strip as they tried to survive the relentless bombardment. Soon after the “ceasefire” went into effect on October 10, 2025, and the scorched earth bombing campaign was reduced to sporadic attacks, Odeh returned to Gaza City and founded Al-Karama School a month later.
The school teaches only four subjects: Arabic, English, mathematics, and science. Other subjects that Gaza students studied before the war, such as physical education, arts, technology, and civics were dropped. Similar to other educational initiatives established in Gaza, Al-Karama School places a strong emphasis on improving children’s mental health and coping with massive amounts of trauma from living through nearly three years of a genocide defined by aerial bombardment, displacement, and starvation.
This past weekend, Al-Karama School organized a summer camp for students with the aim of working to alleviate their psychological suffering. Children sang and performed dances together amid the scattered olive groves and were given space to talk about their experiences and what they had witnessed.
Thirteen-year-old Mais Fayad addressed the rest of the students and spoke with a painful eloquence far beyond her years. “The war killed what remained of our dreams and destroyed our homes and schools. This war is painful. It tore our hearts apart with fear and terror. What heart could possibly hold all of this, oh God? You feel that your happiness is a betrayal, your comfort is a betrayal, and the roof over your head is a betrayal. You feel ashamed to be happy so that you do not betray their grief, and you suppress the pain of your helplessness, apologizing to them for remaining alive,” she said.
Aseel Shaher, whose 12-year-old son Mohammed attends Al-Karama School, told Drop Site the war created a new generation of students deprived of an education but that schools like Al-Karama “gave us hope that life could return to Gaza again.”
Shaher and her family were displaced more than seven times during the war. They were driven into poverty after her husband lost his clothing store, forcing the family to send Mohammed to work in the street markets to help provide food for the household. “I was never happy about my child working. But there was nothing we could do,” Shaher said. “Now what I had been hoping for has happened: my child has stopped working in the market and returned to learning.”
Over the past several months, mosques, community centers, and public libraries have opened their doors to students to serve as temporary educational centers. The makeshift schools are able to function only because hundreds of teachers have volunteered their time and effort.
“Popular educational initiatives provide students with instruction in core subjects, alongside recreational activities and programs to ease the burden of the war on students and compensate them, to some extent, for the education and schooling they have lost,” Mohammed Al-Koumi, a volunteer Arabic-language teacher, told Drop Site. “Children in Palestine have the right to learn, play, and achieve the hopes and ambitions that the war has killed.”
Al-Koumi also noted that while the war had slowed, it has not ended, and parents continue to worry about sending their children to school for fear of them getting bombed, shelled, or shot by the Israeli military.
The Ministry of Education in Gaza has also sought to promote remote learning as a way to involve more children, with lessons uploaded by teachers online and made available on mobile applications. However, a severe deterioration in internet services as a result of Israel targeting telecommunications towers, frequent electricity cuts, and a severe shortage of smartphones and computers as a result of the Israeli blockade, has left large segments of the student population unable to access online lessons. Only 14% of the total number of students are currently enrolled in online education, according to Abu Zaiter.
As a result, parents, teachers, and volunteers have worked to create in-person alternatives and community initiatives that allow children to continue their education face-to-face, albeit under extremely limited conditions and resources.
Numerous fundraising campaigns have been launched to collect donations to provide the basic necessities required for some level of in-person education. Some initiatives have managed to provide desks, tables, and blackboards for students and teachers.
Community- and government-led educational projects have played a significant role in providing “temporary schools” for students, according to Abu Zaiter, with some 400,000 children enrolled in some kind of school program. Yet nearly 130,000 children—or one fifth of all students—remain outside of the education process, Abu Zaiter said.
While local and international institutions, including UNICEF, have provided important support to the devastated education sector, the scale of support remains far below actual needs, he added.
Educational initiatives like Al-Karama School “remain temporary solutions that cannot be relied upon for many years,” Abu Zaiter said. He stressed that Israel needed to open the crossings into Gaza to allow for construction materials, equipment, and resources—including notebooks and pencils—in order to begin to rehabilitate Gaza’s school infrastructure.
Speaking to the other children at Al-Karama School, 13-year-old Fayyad put it succinctly. “We are the broken children of Gaza, whose hearts have been shattered by the war, deprived of their dreams and ambitions and their schools. Don’t we have the right to learn? Don’t we have the right to live in a safe place, achieve our dreams, and sleep in peace and tranquility?”
