olivewire.org

UNRWA Schools in Gaza: Half a Million Students and a System Under Attack

For decades, the most reliable constant in a Gaza childhood was the school run. Before dawn, families stirred. By seven in the morning, the narrow streets between Jabalia’s concrete blocks and Beach Camp’s salt-bleached alleyways filled with children carrying bags stitched with the pale-blue logo of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. UNRWA schools were, in many neighborhoods, the only institution that showed up every year — through blockades, through wars, through funerals.

That system — nearly 300 schools, close to 290,000 students, and roughly 9,700 teachers and staff as of the 2022–23 academic year, according to UNRWA’s own reporting — has been methodically destroyed since October 2023. Understanding what has been lost requires understanding what was actually there.

What UNRWA Built in Gaza

UNRWA began operating schools in Gaza in 1950, one year after its founding, absorbing the children of the 700,000-plus Palestinians expelled or displaced during the 1948 Nakba. By the time Hamas assumed control of the Strip in 2007 and Israel tightened its blockade, UNRWA ran the largest single educational network in Gaza, dwarfing the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Education system in the territory. Its schools operated on double shifts — morning and afternoon — because the demand for desks outpaced the physical space available.

In the 2022–23 school year, UNRWA reported 284 schools serving approximately 289,000 registered refugee students across Gaza. Class sizes routinely exceeded 40 pupils. The curriculum followed Palestinian Authority standards, but UNRWA’s schools also carried a particular weight: for children who knew no other country, the schoolroom was one of the few places where the word refugee was spoken plainly and without shame. Scholars including Rashid Khalidi have written about how UNRWA’s educational infrastructure became inseparable from the preservation of Palestinian collective identity across generations.

Shelters in Every War — and the Cost of That Role

Because UNRWA schools are large, recognizable, and distributed across every governorate of Gaza, they became default shelters the moment bombing began — in 2008–09, in 2012, in 2014, and in every escalation since. Families who had nowhere else to go slept on classroom floors under the blue UNRWA flag, believing — not unreasonably — that a United Nations facility would command some protection under international humanitarian law.

That assumption was repeatedly proved wrong. During Operation Cast Lead (December 2008 – January 2009), Israeli strikes hit two UNRWA schools in northern Gaza that were being used as shelters. On 6 January 2009, Israeli tank shells struck the UNRWA Asma Elementary School compound in Beit Lahia, killing at least 30 people who had taken refuge there, according to UNRWA and Human Rights Watch reporting at the time. Days later, on 17 January 2009, an Israeli strike hit the UNRWA Jabalia Preparatory School compound, which was also sheltering displaced civilians. A UN Board of Inquiry subsequently found that Israeli forces had been given the GPS coordinates of UNRWA shelters and that the Agency had communicated those coordinates to the Israeli military multiple times before the strikes.

During Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014, UNRWA reported that at least seven of its shelters were struck, with particularly devastating attacks on the school in Beit Hanoun on 24 July 2014 and the Jabaliya shelter on 30 July 2014. The latter killed at least 20 people. UNRWA’s then-Commissioner-General Pierre Krähenbühl said publicly that the Agency had conveyed the shelter’s coordinates to Israeli authorities 17 times in the hours before the strike. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights described the strikes as “a serious violation of international law.” Israel maintained that militants had fired from near the facilities.

October 2023 and the Collapse of the System

Nothing in the prior decades compared to what followed 7 October 2023. Israel’s military campaign across Gaza was, by virtually every humanitarian metric, larger in scale and longer in duration than any previous operation. UNRWA schools were converted almost immediately into mass shelters — eventually hosting, at the peak of displacement, more than a million internally displaced people across dozens of sites, according to UNRWA situation reports.

The Agency documented repeated strikes on or adjacent to school-shelters throughout 2023 and 2024. By mid-2024, UNRWA reported that more than two-thirds of its school buildings in Gaza had sustained damage or been destroyed. Staff members were killed. Entire school compounds were reduced to rubble that displaced families were still living in when the next strike came.

Formal education in Gaza effectively ceased. UNRWA suspended regular schooling operations. For the approximately 625,000 school-age children in Gaza identified by UNICEF, the academic year became a period measured not in terms and examinations but in the movement between shelters.

The Campaign to Dismantle UNRWA Itself

In January 2024, Israel alleged that a number of UNRWA staff members had participated in or had foreknowledge of the 7 October Hamas-led attack. Several major donor countries — including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and others — suspended funding almost immediately. UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini announced that nine employees had been dismissed and that an independent review had been commissioned.

That independent review, conducted by a panel led by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna and published in April 2024, found that UNRWA had robust neutrality mechanisms and that Israel had not provided substantive evidence to support the broader allegations. The panel called for reinforcing, not dismantling, the Agency. Most suspended donors eventually resumed contributions, though the episode had already produced funding gaps that disrupted operations for months.

Israel’s government went further, with the Knesset passing legislation in late October 2024 that banned UNRWA from operating on Israeli territory and prohibited Israeli authorities from coordinating with it — a move that UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned would make it “impossible” to deliver humanitarian aid in Gaza and the West Bank. Over 100 countries and the International Court of Justice, which had issued provisional measures in January 2024 ordering Israel to facilitate humanitarian assistance, expressed alarm.

What the Erasure of a School System Means

UNRWA’s education mandate was never simply about literacy rates or exam results. In Gaza, it was the infrastructure through which roughly half the Strip’s population — the registered refugee community — accessed a formal relationship with the idea that their displacement was temporary and documented, that a record existed, that someone was counting.

When those schools burned, more than classrooms were lost. For the children photographed clutching notebooks in the rubble of Jabalia or sheltering under collapsed ceilings in Beach Camp, the destruction was also the destruction of the institutional acknowledgment that they existed, that their parents had been displaced from somewhere real, that the world had made a promise — however hollow it had become — to keep track.

Whether those schools will be rebuilt, and under whose authority, is one of the defining political questions of whatever comes after the current assault. For now, an entire generation of Gazan children has had their education not interrupted but erased, and the system that served them for 75 years is fighting for its own survival.

Sources

Étiqueté , , , , ,

Laisser un commentaire

Votre adresse e-mail ne sera pas publiée. Les champs obligatoires sont indiqués avec *