Gaza's children have missed 2 years of school. A truce won't undo the damage
She's part of a generation of Palestinians from grade school through university who have had virtually no access to education in the territory since the war began in October 2023. Classes were suspended that month and schools were transformed into crowded shelters as hundreds of thousands fled their homes at the start of Israel's campaign of retaliation after Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
The closure of schools has removed a key social outlet for young people as they grapple with war, hunger and displacement. For younger children, it has meant missing out on basic skills like reading and simple arithmetic. For older students, advanced subjects, graduation exams and college applications have all been put on hold.
Even if negotiations lead to another ceasefire, it's unclear when anything in Gaza will be rebuilt. Vast areas have been completely destroyed, and the U.N. children's agency estimates that nearly 90% of schools will need substantial reconstruction before they can function again.
Like many in Gaza, Qanan's family has been displaced multiple times and is now living in a tent. When an Israeli airstrike destroyed their home in early 2024, she dug through the rubble in search of her books, but 'there was nothing left.'
'My sole dream was to study medicine,' Qanan said. 'I stopped thinking about it. All my thoughts now are about how to survive.'
Hundreds of thousands out of school
More than 650,000 students have had no access to education since the start of the war, according to the U.N. children's agency, UNICEF. That includes nearly 40,000 students who were unable to take university entry exams that largely determine their career prospects.
It's the first time in decades that the exams were not administered in Gaza.
Israel's bombardment and ground operations have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and displaced 90% of Gaza's population. School-age children in crowded shelters and tent camps are often forced to help their families find food, water and firewood. A complete Israeli blockade imposed in early March that was only slightly eased 2 ½ months later has driven the territory to the brink of famine.
Local education officials, working with UNICEF and other aid groups, set up hundreds of learning spaces to try and provide education during the war.
'We're trying to salvage what we can of the educational process, so that the next generation doesn't slip through our fingers,' said Mohamed al-Asouli, head of the education department in the southern city of Khan Younis.
During a six-week ceasefire in January and February, some 600 learning spaces provided lessons for around 173,000 children, according to UNICEF. But since March, when Israel ended the truce with a surprise bombardment, nearly half have shut down.
'The impact goes beyond learning losses,' said Rosalia Bollen, a UNICEF spokeswoman. 'Children in Gaza have been trapped in a cycle not just of exposure to unprecedented violence, but also a cycle of fear, of toxic stress, of anxiety.'
'Two years of my life are gone'
Some have tried to continue their studies through online learning, but it's not easy in Gaza, where there has been no central electricity since the start of the war. Palestinians must use solar panels or hard-to-find generators to charge their phones, and internet is unreliable.
'The mobile phone is not always charged, and we only have one at home,' said Nesma Zouaroub, a mother of four school-age children. She said her youngest son should be in second grade but does not know how to read or write.
'The children's future is ruined,' she said.
Ola Shaban tried to continue her civil engineering studies online through her university after the campus was destroyed by Israeli forces in April 2024. She had to walk long distances to get a signal in her hometown near Khan Younis, and she eventually gave up.
'I couldn't continue because of lack of internet, continuous displacement and the constant sense of fear,' she said. 'Two years of my life are gone.'
Israel's offensive has killed over 57,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's Health Ministry. The ministry, which is part of the Hamas-run government, does not differentiate between combatants and civilians but says over half the dead are women and children. Its figures are used by the U.N. and other international organizations as the most reliable statistics on war casualties.
Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people in the Oct. 7 attack and abducted 251. They are still holding 50 hostages, less than half believed to be alive, after most of the rest were released in ceasefire deals or other agreements.
Qanan's father, Ibrahim, a local journalist, said his family did everything it could to support Sarah's ambition to study medicine, only to see it go up in smoke when the war broke out.
'The war stunned us and turned our life upside down,' the father of six said. 'Our dreams and hopes were buried in the rubble of our home.'
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Magdy reported from Cairo.
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Reuters
a minute ago
- Reuters
Insight: Russia at the gates: How Ukraine defended a strategic city for months
DONETSK REGION, July 28 (Reuters) - For months, Ukraine has picked off Russian soldiers by the thousand around the frontline city of Pokrovsk, using small drones armed with bombs to tie down a numerically superior force. Now though, Russian troops are creeping forward in a summer offensive that has probed weak spots in Ukraine's defences and last week saw some Russian soldiers enter the city for the first time, according to footage on Ukrainian and Russian Telegram channels and geolocated by Reuters. Ukrainian soldiers' success in stopping their enemy from taking Pokrovsk since last year has long thwarted one of Moscow's central military goals, although the city itself is heavily damaged and all but a few hundred of the 60,000-strong population has fled. Pokrovsk sits atop large coking coal reserves and until Russian forces moved closer was important to Ukraine's military supply lines in the country's east. Reuters spoke to more than a dozen sources including Ukrainian soldiers and relatives of Russian soldiers missing in action around the city, and made two trips to the area over four months to examine the shifting tactics in the key theatre of the eastern front. The Pokrovsk front is the most active in the war, with 111,000 Russian soldiers amassed there for the summer offensive, Ukrainian top military commander Oleksandr Syrskyi has said. Russia's forces initially aimed to seize Pokrovsk early last year, first with frontal assaults and later trying to encircle the city, which Russia calls by the Soviet-era name Krasnoarmeysk, or Red Army town. Ukraine slowed the advance this spring by deploying experienced units, laying minefields and other defensive barriers, while harassing Russian forces with large numbers of drones, said Viktor Trehubov, spokesperson for the military administration that covers Pokrovsk. 'They didn't stop trying to advance, but we were repelling them well,' said an artillery unit soldier who goes by call sign Vogak and serves on the Pokrovsk front. Since then, Moscow's forces have picked up the pace, adapting and expanding the use of drones in their own arsenal. Russia has built on the lessons used in pushing Ukrainian forces out of its Kursk region, where it first scaled the use of fibre-optic cable drones that cannot be stopped by the electronic jammers both sides used to confuse regular radio-controlled drones, analyst Michael Kofman said. The spools of hair-like cable give them enough range that Russia can threaten Ukraine's forces and logistics 25 kilometres behind the front line. Russia has more of the fibre-optic drones than Ukraine, giving them an advantage, said Roman Pohorilyi, the founder of Ukrainian open-source research group DeepState. The advances accelerated after Russia took control of a highway in May that connects Pokrovsk to Kostiantynivka, another of Ukraine's 'fortress cities' in the east, a map generated by DeepState shows. One of the main roads to the city is covered by nets to protect vehicles from Russian drone strikes. Serhii Dobriak, the head of the local military administration, last week said it was increasingly hard to deliver food to the city and that grocery stores would have to close in the coming days. While faster than before, Russia's territorial gains remain minor, with only 5,000 square kilometres (1,930 square miles) of Ukraine taken since the start of last year, less than 1% of the country's overall territory, according to a June report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. In total, Russia has occupied around a fifth of Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the entry of small groups of Russian troops into Pokrovsk was insignificant and that they were "all destroyed" by Ukraine's soldiers. Russia's Defence Ministry did not respond to detailed requests for comment for this story. Serhii Filimonov, commander of a Ukrainian military battalion called 'Da Vinci Wolves,' which operates around Pokrovsk, saw first-hand how Russia's glacial advance on the city over the past year cost it heavily in killed and injured soldiers in the first half of 2025. Russian soldiers tried to advance by stealth but were hounded by Ukrainian soldiers flying small quadcopter drones mounted with cameras and explosives, he said. 'Every prisoner says drones are the thing they are most afraid of, the thing that constantly kills them, and the things they see when they sleep, the nightmares they have,' Filimonov told Reuters in an interview in April, citing debriefs of Russian soldiers captured by his men. Filimonov said groups of attackers were given a phone with a location pinned on a map, and told to head towards it. If the first group was killed, another one was sent to replace them, he said, citing the debriefs. Reuters was unable to independently verify his account. The Russians operated in raiding parties of around a half a dozen, often advancing on foot because large vehicles are an easy target for drone pilots, Filimonov and Trehubov said. Some left their vehicles as far as nine miles (15 km) from the front line and walked the rest of the way to be less visible to drone operators, Filimonov said. Others have taken to motorbikes to outpace the aircraft, piloted by Ukrainian soldiers often wearing virtual reality-style goggles attached to a drone's camera, offering a first-person view of the route and target, Trehubov said. The Ukrainian resistance in and around Pokrovsk has blocked Russia's ambition of taking the remaining parts of Ukraine's Donetsk region, one of President Vladimir Putin's principal war aims. Although its significance to Ukraine as a military supply centre has already faded, Kyiv-based military analyst Serhii Kuzan said Pokrovsk's fall could free up Russian troops and open the door to more Russian advances in the region. More than a million Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded since the invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022, almost a quarter of those since the start of this year, according to British military intelligence estimates. Reuters could not verify these numbers. Neither Ukraine nor Russia gives official data on their own personnel losses. Towards the end of last year, Moscow's commanders deployed soldiers with very little training, including convicts or injured men, according to conversations with five relatives of Russian soldiers. The relatives did not want their identity or the soldiers' identities published for fear of reprisals. The army struggled to account for who was missing or dead, the relatives said. One soldier was sent on a combat mission on the Pokrovsk front despite having an injury to his leg sustained on previous missions, according to a relative. 'He could barely walk,' the relative said. He went missing on March 9, when his vehicle was hit. The relative said a member of his unit, to whom she had spoken, had heard him over the radio after the strike, saying he had been badly wounded. He was listed as absent without leave, she said, though she believes he is dead or taken prisoner. Another soldier, recruited from a Russian penal colony on December 18, was given a week of training and on December 26 was sent on a combat mission on the Pokrovsk front, according to a relative. The relative said he had not been heard from since. Shortly before the mission, the soldier rang relatives to ask them to send 50,000 roubles ($600) so he could buy a walkie-talkie. She said the soldier was officially listed at the end of December as having gone absent without leave, but she believed he was dead. A third soldier, a 21-year-old father of two from western Siberia, signed a contract with the army in 2024 after he was promised a non-combat role far from Ukrainian frontlines and signing-on bonuses of 1 million roubles, or $12,000, according to his relative. But instead, he was sent to Ukraine and in late December, he was ordered on a raid near the village of Vovkove, on the Pokrovsk front. In January, he was designated as absent without leave. At the end of April his family was notified he had been killed in action on December 27, according to the relative and letters from the military seen by Reuters. His relative said the family received 5 million roubles and a monthly pension as compensation for his death. The overall commander of Ukraine's land forces, Major-General Mykhaylo Drapatyi, was given the additional direct responsibility for the part of the front that includes Pokrovsk in January, after another town fell. Drapatyi, who previously stopped a Russian offensive on the second city of Kharkiv, brought 'a fresh vision' to the battle, helping mount counter-attacks to disrupt Russian advances and threaten its local logistics, DeepState's Pohorilyi said. However, Russia's adaptation and new technology such as the fibre-optic drones have shifted the balance. What soldiers call the drone 'kill zone' stretches several kilometres either side of the front line. That creates challenges to sustaining logistical supply chains for both armies. Any vehicle bringing forward fresh supplies of men, ammunition, food and water can be targeted. The overall Russian advance over the whole frontline doubled from 226 square kilometres in April to around 538 square kilometres in May, according to open-source analyst Pasi Paroinen with the Finnish 'Black Bird Group'. DeepState estimated that Ukraine had its biggest territorial losses of 2025 in June. More than a quarter of the 556 square kilometres taken by Russia in June were on the Pokrovsk front, DeepState estimated. Filimonov's Da Vinci Wolves fight on, defending the city against Russia's latest recruits. 'Russia finds new victims, which it throws into the furnace,' he said. ($1 = 79.4000 roubles)
The Guardian
31 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Starmer to meet Trump to discuss Gaza and trade, as minister suggests UK could recognise Palestinian state
Update: Date: 2025-07-28T08:30:52.000Z Title: Starmer to meet Trump to discuss Gaza and trade, as minister suggests UK could recognise Palestinian state by next election Content: Good morning. Keir Starmer has a lead role in the Trump show today. He is flying to Scotland for a meeting with the US president, who is combining a golfing holiday with meetings with leaders like Starmer, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, and John Swinney, Scotland's first minister. The von der Leyen talks culminated in the announcement of what Trump described as a 'powerful' trade deal (albeit one that only means the Trump tariffs won't damage US-EU trade as much as they otherwise might have done; it is not an improvement on the status quo ante.) Starmer is set to spend a lot of time with Trump today. He is arriving before lunch, and he is not flying back to London until this evening, after what No 10 describes as a 'private engagement' (dinner?) at Trump's golf course in Aberdeenshire. There is a bilateral meeting schedule, but Trump does not like long meetings and Downing Street has not said much about what else the two men will be doing. Starmer has reportedly been working how to respond if Trump invites him to play a round of golf. According to my colleague Eleni Courea, who is Scotland covering the trip, that is one humiliation that Trump won't be inflicting on the PM, who is a good footballer but a total novice at Trump's favourite sport. But Starmer will also be flying to Aberdeen with the president on Air Force One, we expect. In White House terms, that is a token of respect. Normally when political leaders meet, they speak to the press afterwards, to brief on what they have agreed. Today Trump and Starmer will hold their main event with reporters before their talks and so we are not expecting them to announce anything of substance at this point. Instead, we may just end up with Trump giving us one of his stream-of-consciousness peformance. While he has been in Scotland, these have include rants about European immigration ('you got to stop this horrible invasion that's happening to Europe – immigration is killing Europe') and wind turbines ('when they start to rust and rot in eight years you can't really turn them off, you can't burn them – the whole thing is a con job'. At one point it was expected that Trump and Starmer would use the meeting today to tie up loose ends in the US-UK trade deal, particularly relating to steel tariffs. But Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, has been giving interviews this morning and he told the Today programme he 'wouldn't expect announcements from this visit' on trade. Instead, the situation in Gaza may be the focus of the Trump/Starmer talks and, as Pippa Crerar reports, Starmer will urge Trump to use his influence with Israel to get Benjamin Netanyahu to resume peace talks with Hamas. This is a difficult subject for Starmer because the PM is coming under increasing pressure from members of his own cabinet to recognise the state of Palestine. Doing this would anger Trump, who takes the Israeli view that this would amount to rewarding Hamas for the 7 October attack. And it would not have any immediate practical impact on the situation in Gaza. But Labour MPs are increasingly coming round to the view that, as Wes Streeting, the health secretary put it, it is best to recognise the state of Palestine 'while there is a state of Palestine left to recognise'. As Mark Malloch Brown, a former UN deputy secretary-general and a minister in Gordon Brown's government, told the Observer yesterday, recognition would also send a message to Israel that 'you can't bomb your way out of the reality that you're going to have to negotiate with the Palestinians.' In interviews this morning Reynolds said that the UK was committed to recognising the state of Palestine; it was just a matter of timing, he said. He told ITV's Good Morning Britain: It is a case of when, not if. It's about how we use this moment, because you can only do it once to have a meaningful breakthrough. And on Sky News he went further, implying he expects recognition to happen during this parliament. In this parliament, yes. I mean, if it delivers the breakthrough that we need. But don't forget, we can only do this once. If we do it in a way which is tokenistic, doesn't produce the end to this conflict, where do we go to next? Here is the agenda for the day. Morning: Rachel Reeves, chancellor, is on a visit in Bournemouth. 11am: Nigel Farage, Reform UK leader, holds a press conference with 'a special guest'. According to the Daily Mail, he is Colin Sutton, a former detective chief inspector, who is joining the party as a crime adviser. 11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing. Around noon: Keir Starmer is due to arrive at President Trump's Turnberry golf course in South Ayrshire, Scotland, where the two leaders are due to speak to the media at around 12.30pm. They will hold a formal meeting in the afternoon before flying to Aberdeen, where Trump owns another golf course and where they are expected to have a private dinner. Around lunchtime: Kemi Badenoch is expected to record a media clip. Afternoon: The Stop Trump Coalition holds a protest outside Trump's Aberdeenshire golf course. Late afternoon: Angela Rayner, deputy PM, hosts a reception for the Lionesses following victory in the Women's Euro 2025. Also, David Lammy, foreign secretary, is in New York for a meeting on a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm at the moment), or message me on social media. I can't read all the messages BTL, but if you put 'Andrew' in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word. If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @ The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary. I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can't promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
BBC News
31 minutes ago
- BBC News
BBC Verify Live: Tracking aid in Gaza and analysing Trump's trade deals
Update: Date: 09:41 BST Title: Welcome to Monday's BBC Verify Live Content: Tom EdgingtonBBC Verify live editor Hello and thank you for joining us for today's BBC Verify Live. Israel has begun a 10-hour pause in military activity in parts of Gaza to allow more aid to be distributed. We're tracking air drop operations, including some that landed in an area that was declared a 'dangerous combat zone'. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer will meet US President Donald Trump in Scotland later. Trade is one of the topics up for discussion as Starmer seeks to reduce the US-imposed 25% tariff on British steel. We'll be unpicking the US-UK trading relationship in light of the deal Trump struck with the EU at the weekend. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage is due to give a press conference later this morning on crime and policing. Our fact-checkers will be following it.
