Shafaqna English- After two years of war that kept them out of classrooms, Gaza’s children are finally returning to school, surrounded by devastation but determined to learn. UNRWA is working to restore a sense of normality in schools that had previously been used as shelters.
“What we need now are notebooks, books, and pens. We want to get our lives back”, said one young Palestinian girl, Sham Al-Abd. She now attends the Deir-al-Balah Joint Elementary School run by the UN’s Palestine refugee agency (UNRWA).
Despite the old furniture and the few drawings that brighten the classroom walls at a school visited by our UN News correspondent, the children’s excitement to return there after months of seeking shelter from the bombs remains undiminished.
One of Sham’s classmates, Asil Al-Loh, spoke enthusiastically about how she felt: “We want to learn and play, and study all subjects as we did before. Now we only study Arabic, English and mathematics.”
Despite the war’s devastation, voices and laughter ring out once again in the hallways of Deir-al-Balah’s school. ‘We want to get our lives back,’ Gaza children declare.
Sources: News.un.org