Beyond Gaza’s Battlefield, a Second Crisis Is Taking Shape: A Generation at Risk of Losing Years of Education
By Sadaf Sundas Riaz | SCN NEWS
ISLAMABAD, Sept. 25, 2024 — The destruction of Gaza is usually counted in people killed, homes damaged and neighbourhoods reduced to rubble, but a new assessment released Wednesday attempts to measure a consequence that could remain long after the fighting stops: lost childhood education. Research produced by academics at the University of Cambridge and the Centre for Lebanese Studies in partnership with the UN agency for Palestinian refugees warns that the war could set Gaza's children and young people's education back by up to five years, depending on when hostilities end and how quickly schooling can be restored. That finding changes the question surrounding Gaza's children from when classrooms will reopen to something far harder: how does an education system recover time that an entire generation has already lost?
The scale of disruption is already extraordinary. Around 625,000 school-age children in Gaza have been deprived of formal education, while roughly 22,500 teachers have also had their working lives disrupted, according to the study. The 2024-25 school year should have begun this month, but formal schooling has not resumed across the Strip. For tens of thousands of six-year-olds, this was supposed to be their first experience of entering a classroom; UNICEF estimated earlier this month that at least 45,000 first-graders were instead beginning another year amid displacement and war.
Missing a school year does not mean merely finishing the same education twelve months later. Children who remain outside classrooms can lose previously acquired skills, fall behind expected literacy and numeracy levels and become progressively harder to reintegrate into age-appropriate learning. For younger children, the absence of structured learning also affects social and cognitive development; for teenagers, prolonged disruption increases the danger that education ends permanently as economic pressure, displacement and family responsibilities pull them toward work or other survival needs. UNICEF has warned that children outside school face increased risks including exploitation, child labour, early marriage and dropping out altogether.
Gaza's crisis is particularly difficult because schools have lost their single purpose. UNRWA's school buildings have traditionally been part of the territory's education infrastructure, but during the war many have become shelters for displaced families. On Sept. 9, the UN said no official schooling was available in any of UNRWA's 200 schools in Gaza, with many being used to shelter people forced from their homes. The transformation illustrates the reconstruction dilemma: restoring education requires not only repairing damaged classrooms but finding somewhere else for displaced families to live.
That produces an extraordinary reversal in the meaning of a school for a child. A building intended to provide education may first close because of war, then become a refuge because a family has lost its home, and finally itself become exposed to violence. Restoring education will therefore require more than textbooks, teachers and repaired walls. Children must once again believe that the place to which adults are asking them to return is safe.
The psychological dimension may prove as difficult to rebuild as the physical infrastructure. Gaza's children have experienced bereavement, repeated displacement, injury, hunger and prolonged fear alongside the loss of routine. UNICEF says parents have reported increased frustration and isolation among children, while temporary learning spaces are being used not simply to teach but to provide recreational activities and psychosocial support. A conventional reconstruction programme can calculate the cost of concrete, desks and school buildings; repairing the relationship between a traumatized child and learning is considerably harder to price.
The new research makes that distinction central to Gaza's future. Its warning of a possible five-year educational setback does not mean every child will literally remain outside school for five years. Rather, the projected loss reflects how disruption, trauma and weakened learning can compound even after formal education resumes. A child can be physically back inside a classroom while remaining years behind the educational trajectory he or she would otherwise have followed.
The consequences could eventually move from individual children into Gaza's wider economy. Today's students are tomorrow's nurses, engineers, teachers, technicians, entrepreneurs and public administrators. If a large share of one generation enters adulthood with substantially less education, reconstruction itself becomes harder because the territory loses part of the skilled human capital needed to rebuild institutions and economic activity. Education recovery is therefore not a secondary humanitarian programme to begin after physical reconstruction; it is one of the conditions required for reconstruction to succeed.
There is also a financing contradiction. Emergency appeals naturally prioritize food, water, shelter and medical treatment when people face immediate threats to survival, but UNICEF said this month that education remained among the least-funded humanitarian sectors. Its education programming for the State of Palestine was facing an 88% funding gap even as hundreds of thousands of children remained outside formal schooling. The result is that an intervention whose benefits may take years to become visible can struggle for resources against emergencies whose consequences are immediate.
Gaza is an extreme example of a wider pattern affecting children in conflict zones. The UN Secretary-General used this month's International Day to Protect Education from Attack to point to rising attacks against students, teachers and schools not only in Gaza but also in Sudan, Myanmar, Ukraine, Colombia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. War damages education twice: first by placing children and teachers in danger, and then by consuming the months and years in which children are supposed to acquire the skills that shape the rest of their lives.
Sudan demonstrates how quickly the same problem can reach national scale. While 600 schools reopened in Red Sea State this month, allowing nearly 140,000 children to begin a new school year, UNICEF said the vast majority of Sudanese children remained outside classrooms amid the country's war. The reopening offered a glimpse of what recovery can look like, but also highlighted the inequality created when some children regain education while millions living in more dangerous areas cannot.
For the international community gathered around UNGA79, this creates a policy challenge extending beyond demands to protect civilians during conflict. Governments and humanitarian agencies must also decide how quickly education should return during an emergency, how learning can continue safely during displacement and how countries eventually compensate children for years that cannot simply be added back to childhood.
The answer matters because educational damage has a different timeline from battlefield damage. A destroyed school can eventually be rebuilt. A missed year in the life of a six-year-old cannot. When disruption stretches into multiple years, the consequences travel with that child into adolescence, employment and adulthood.
That is the less visible crisis emerging behind Gaza's casualty figures. Even when the fighting eventually stops, the educational consequences will not stop with it. The real measure of recovery will be whether hundreds of thousands of children can return not merely to classrooms, but to a future that war has already pushed years further away.