UN launches push to return Gazan children to school in aftermath of war |
The United Nations announced on Tuesday a major push to get hundreds of thousands of children across the war-scarred Gaza Strip back to school for the first time in more than two years.
Since the start of the war sparked by the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel, 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 spokesman James Elder told reporters in Geneva.
UNICEF was now dramatically scaling up its education initiative in the territory, Elder said, in what he described as “one of the largest emergency learning efforts anywhere in the world.”
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. US President Donald Trump kicked off the second phase of the ceasefire last week.
UNICEF 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 by the end of this year, and to get all school-age children back to in-person learning in 2027.
UNICEF is working on the project with the Palestinian Authority Education Ministry and the UN agency supporting Palestinians, UNRWA, which, before the war, was........