A UN commissioner has warned that the lack of education for Palestinian children in Gaza due to the Israeli war on the Strip could lead to “a lost generation.”
This came in a statement by Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), on the X platform today, Wednesday, regarding education, schools, and the conditions of school-age children in the besieged Strip.
“Gaza has become a place where schools are no longer schools,” Lazzarini said.
He said that after Israel began its war on October 7, UNRWA was forced to close its schools and turn them into shelters for displaced Palestinians.
“Classrooms that used to receive children are now either filled with displaced families or destroyed. Desks have been replaced with beds, and many schools are no longer places of learning, but hotbeds of despair, hunger, disease and death,” he added.
The UN official recalled that half of Gaza’s 600,000 school children were receiving their education in UNRWA schools before the Israeli war on the besieged Strip.
Lazzarini pointed out that Palestinian children were unable to go to school in the new academic year due to the Israeli war.
“The longer children remain out of school in the ruins of a destroyed place, the greater the risk that they will become a lost generation,” he said, stressing the right of Gaza’s children to education like other children in the world.
The Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education said yesterday that Israel had killed 8,672 school and university students in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank since October 7.
The ministry indicated that 353 government schools and universities, and 65 UNRWA schools in the Gaza Strip, were damaged and completely or partially destroyed.
Since October 7, 2023, Israel has been waging a devastating war on Gaza, leaving about 136,000 Palestinian martyrs and wounded, most of them children and women, and more than 10,000 missing, amid massive destruction and deadly famine.