“I’ve been stuck in sixth grade for two years now because I never had a chance to finish” year, says Afnan Khaled Al-Shenbari, a 12-year-old from Gaza. The ongoing war in the Palestinian enclave has abruptly interrupted her school year and is now depriving her of a school year for the second time.
Like her, some 600,000 children in Gaza, the majority of whom are displaced, have been deprived of returning to school this year, as fighting continues to rage and hundreds of schools have been destroyed or transformed into reception centers in nearly a year of war, the site reports. Middle East Eye in a report from central Gaza.
“In CM2, I had a high average at the end of the year, 92 out of 100, and I hoped to get an even higher average in sixth grade. But here I am, spending my life in school, not for education, but to shelter from the bombings,” deplores the young girl interviewed by the pan-Arab media.
“Scolaricide”
Currently displaced in a school in Deir Al-Balah, in central Gaza, Afnan is originally from Beit Hanoun, in the north of the enclave. It was there that in August 2023 she had “bought a pink backpack for the new school year”, before the October 7 massacres carried out by Hamas and the devastating war that followed changed his life and those of hundreds of thousands of children.
“In the early hours of mid-October, she took her books out of her bag, filled it with some clothes and fled her home with her family under intense bombardment by the Israeli army,” tell Middle East Eye.
Since then, more than 70% of the 813 schools in the Gaza Strip have been damaged or destroyed, while more than 300 establishments have been improvised as reception centers, leading some voices, including those of experts, to accuse the government of Benjamin Netanyahu of “scolaricide”.
Mental health impacts
While waiting for the end of hostilities and a hypothetical reconstruction project, which do not seem to be happening tomorrow, a few initiatives are emerging here and there to try to fill, even if only very partially, the abysmal void created by this massive dropout. One of which is the UN initiative, launched at the beginning of August and called “Back to Learning”, tells Middle East Eye.
[…] - Courrier international
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