The devastating effect of the Israel-Hamas war on education in Gaza

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• John Yang:

  The World Health Organization says the future of an entire generation in Gaza is at risk. Children are dying of the effects of malnutrition and disease, and from a lack of adequate water and sanitation. And there's another casualty from five months of war between Israel and Hamas Gaza school system.

• Hned Al-Doji (through translator):

  My dreams have been voided. My ambition has been broken, my dreams have been lost. They're nothing. Myself, I used to want to do well and get grades, and make my family happy, and go to university and study and do well. But my ambitions have been voided. Everything has been broken.

• John Yang:

  By some estimates, at least half of all Gaza structures have been damaged or destroyed, and many of them are schools. William Brangham has more.

• William Brangham:

  The education system in Gaza was facing serious challenges before the war began. But today, more than 800 lower schools and 17 higher education institutions lay in ruins, having been either partially bombed or entirely destroyed. Making matters worse, Gaza's population is disproportionately young, and have school age around 65 percent or 24 years old or younger.

  David Skinner works for Save the Children where he's the Senior Education cluster coordinator in the occupied Palestinian territory. He joins us from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. David Skinner, thank you so much for joining us today.

  On some level, I think many of our viewers will be surprised to learn that there is any education that is able to go on in Gaza, given the ongoing war there, can you just tell us a little bit about what kind of instruction and education children can get today?

  David Skinner, Save the Children: I don't think people should be thinking that is a full scale education, it's very hesitant, it's very trivial. But if you imagine that you're in a shelter in Ramallah, or in Gaza, there is a very immediate desire for education to take place.

  And so what we're seeing in the shelters is organic education activities taking place. So parents are coming together, there are teachers in the shelters and education is happening. It's not people sitting in rows with a whiteboard in front of them and teachers teaching the times table, or the alphabet, it's a place for structure and for some kind of escape, if you like, from the immediacy of the issues in front of you.

• William Brangham:

  I mean, just as you're describing it, I imagine that it on some level, it does provide some small trace of normalcy of what life used to be like before the bond starting to fall.

• David Skinner:

  Those people that are experts in mental health that are telling us education is one of the most important things for the mental health of children is to give them a rhythm is to give them security is to give them some kind of predictability. And school plays an enormous part in that.

  And I don't want to exaggerate this, William, I don't want you to feel that there's sort of a fully-fledged or anything like a fully-fledged system in Gaza. I think it's more accurate to think of the shoots of education coming up within the shelters as as communities are trying to care for their children.

• William Brangham:

  And I know it's got to be difficult to encapsulate the experience of all the children that you might be working with.

• David Skinner:

  Yeah.

• William Brangham:

  But can you just share some sense of what you're hearing from your colleagues about how those children in shelters are doing?

• David Skinner:

  I have children, I think you've got children really imagine your children in a shelter where you as a parent are concerned and vais as a child are concerned that a missile is going to hit the shelter but they're going to be harmed if they go into the street. They don't have enough food to eat, many of them are sick as well as diarrhea, there's a chest infections and so on going on, many are facing food poverty and in the north they're facing malnutrition.

  And no child has been to school in any formal sense since the seventh of October. That's nearly an academic years of schooling that's been lost. So if you had academic dreams, hopes, aspirations, those have been those have taken a hit. It's not good being a child and Gaza at the moment.

• William Brangham:

  You were talking about the schools and the Israelis argue that they only target structures where Hamas was operating. Have you are any of your staff seen any evidence that that is the case?

• David Skinner:

  I have not seen evidence that Hamas have been in the schools, but it's not my area of authority. I mean, what I can say is that over 70 percent of schools have been either destroyed or damaged.

  So one of the big challenges we're going to be facing after there is a definitive ceasefire is the physical reconstruction of schools, which is going to be expensive, it's going to be difficult, it's going to be more difficult than say, after an earthquake because you've got unexploded ordnance scattered through the rubble.

  But it's comparatively simple, conceptually, at least compared to some of the other issues that we're going to be facing. The biggest issue that children are going to be facing in terms of catching up is the — is their mental health, frankly, it's going to be really tough to try to support children who've been so, so much going through that.

  So you've got a physical, you've got an educational and you've got a mental health set of issues. Once there's a definitive ceasefire. I can't think of anything that I've seen, and I've been in this doing this for 20 years now, where you've seen such a degradation over such a short period of time of an education system.

• William Brangham:

  All right, David Skinner of Save the Children. Thank you so much for spending time with us.

• David Skinner:

  That's fine, thank you.