Gazans Strive to Study as War Shatters Education System

 A boy looks on as Palestinians prepare to flee Rafah after Israeli forces launched a ground and air operation in the eastern part of the southern Gaza city, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip May 12, 2024. (Reuters)
A boy looks on as Palestinians prepare to flee Rafah after Israeli forces launched a ground and air operation in the eastern part of the southern Gaza city, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip May 12, 2024. (Reuters)
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Gazans Strive to Study as War Shatters Education System

 A boy looks on as Palestinians prepare to flee Rafah after Israeli forces launched a ground and air operation in the eastern part of the southern Gaza city, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip May 12, 2024. (Reuters)
A boy looks on as Palestinians prepare to flee Rafah after Israeli forces launched a ground and air operation in the eastern part of the southern Gaza city, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip May 12, 2024. (Reuters)

Pupils sitting cross-legged on the sand take classes in a tent near Khan Younis in Gaza. Two sisters connect online to a West Bank school from Cairo. A professor in Germany helps Palestinian students link up with European universities.
After watching their schools and universities be closed, damaged or destroyed in more than seven months of war, Gazans sheltering inside and outside the territory are doing what they can to restart some learning, Reuters said.
"We are receiving students, and we have a very large number of them still waiting," said Asmaa al-Astal, a volunteer teacher at the tent school near the coast in al-Mawasi, which opened in late April.
Instead of letting children lose a whole year of schooling as they cower from Israeli bombardment, "we will be with them, we will bring them here, and we will teach them," she said.
Gazans fear the conflict between Israel and Hamas has inflicted damage to their education system, a rare source of hope and pride in the enclave that will outlast the fighting.
Gaza and the occupied West Bank have internationally high literacy levels, but Israel's blockade of the coastal Palestinian enclave and repeated rounds of conflict left education fragile and under-resourced.
Since the war began on Oct. 7, schools have been bombed or turned into shelters for displaced people, leaving Gaza's estimated 625,000 school-aged children unable to attend classes.
All 12 of Gaza's higher education institutions have been destroyed or damaged, leaving nearly 90,000 students stranded, and more than 350 teachers and academics have been killed, according to Palestinian official data.
"We lost friends, we lost doctors, we lost teaching assistants, we lost professors, we lost so many things in this war," said Israa Azoum, a fourth-year medical student at Gaza City's Al Azhar University.
Azoum is volunteering at Al Aqsa hospital in the town of Deir al-Balah to help stretched staff deal with waves of patients, but also because she doesn't want to "lose the connection with science".
"I never feel tired because this is what I love doing. I love medicine, I love working as a doctor, and I don't want to forget what I have learnt," she said.
Fahid Al-Hadad, head of Al Aqsa's emergency department and a lecturer at the faculty of medicine at the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG), said he hoped to start teaching again, though he had lost books and papers accumulated over more than a decade when his home in Gaza City was destroyed.
Online instruction will be complicated by weak internet, but could at least allow students to complete their degrees, he said. The buildings of IUG and Al Azhar stand badly damaged and abandoned on neighboring sites in Gaza City.
"We are ready to give in any way, but much better inside Gaza than outside. Because don't forget that we are doctors and we are working," Hadad said.
'LIFESAVING ACT'
Tens of thousands of Gazans who crossed to Egypt also face challenges. Though living in relative safety, they lack the papers to enroll their children in schools, so some have signed up for remote learning offered from the West Bank, where Palestinians have limited self-rule under Israeli military occupation.
The Palestinian embassy in Cairo is planning to supervise end-of-year exams for 800 high school students.
Kamal al-Batrawi, a 46-year-old businessman, said his two school-aged daughters began online schooling after the family arrived in the Egyptian capital five months ago.
"They take classes every day, from 8 a.m. until 1:30 p.m., as if they were in a regular school. This is a lifesaving act," he said.
In southern Gaza, where more than a million people were displaced, UN children's agency UNICEF has been organizing recreational activities like singing and dancing with some basic learning. It is planning to create 50 tents where 6,000 children will be able to take classes in three daily shifts.
"It's important to do it, but it remains a drop in the ocean," said Jonathan Crickx, head of communications for UNICEF Palestine.
Wesam Amer, Dean of the Faculty of Communication and Languages at Gaza University, said although online teaching could be an interim solution, it could not provide the physical or practical learning required for subjects like medicine and engineering.
After leaving Gaza for Germany in November, he is advising students on how to match up their courses with options at universities in the West Bank or Europe.
"The challenges of the day after the war aren't only about the infrastructure, university buildings. It is about the dozens of academics who have been killed in the war and the tough task of trying to make up for them or replace them," he said.
Those killed include IUG president Sufyan Tayeh, who died with his wife and all his five children in a strike on his sister's house in December.
Tayeh, an award-winning professor of theoretical physics and applied mathematics, had a "great passion" for science, his brother Nabil told Reuters.
"Even in the middle of the war, he (Tayeh) was still working on his own research," he said.
The UN estimates that 72.5% of schools in Gaza will need full reconstruction or major rehabilitation.
Mental health and psychosocial support will also be needed for children to "feel safe in going back to a school that might have been bombed", Crickx said.



Drugs, Weapons in Syria Borderland Where Hezbollah Held Sway

Fighters loyal to the interim Syrian government deploy at a position along the Anti-Lebanon mountain range near al-Qusayr in the west of Syria's Homs province on February 10, 2025. (AFP)
Fighters loyal to the interim Syrian government deploy at a position along the Anti-Lebanon mountain range near al-Qusayr in the west of Syria's Homs province on February 10, 2025. (AFP)
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Drugs, Weapons in Syria Borderland Where Hezbollah Held Sway

Fighters loyal to the interim Syrian government deploy at a position along the Anti-Lebanon mountain range near al-Qusayr in the west of Syria's Homs province on February 10, 2025. (AFP)
Fighters loyal to the interim Syrian government deploy at a position along the Anti-Lebanon mountain range near al-Qusayr in the west of Syria's Homs province on February 10, 2025. (AFP)

In a desolate area of Syria where Lebanese armed group Hezbollah once held sway, security forces shot open the gates to an abandoned building and found a defunct drug factory.

Syria's new authorities launched a security campaign last week around Qusayr at the porous Lebanese border, cracking down on drug and weapons smugglers.

They have also accused Iran-backed Hezbollah, which for years propped up Bashar al-Assad, of firing at them in clashes in the weeks since his ouster.

"We've begun to comb factories used by Hezbollah and remnants of the defunct regime," said Major Nadim Madkhana, who heads Syria's border security force in Homs province near Lebanon.

Before Syria's war erupted in 2011, Syrians and Lebanese lived side by side in the border area -- a mostly tribal region long renowned for smuggling.

In April 2013, Hezbollah announced it was fighting alongside Assad's forces and leading battles in the Qusayr area, an opposition stronghold at the time.

After weeks of battles that displaced thousands of Syrians, Hezbollah seized control of the area, establishing bases and weapons depots and digging tunnels -- which Israel repeatedly targeted in subsequent years.

Hezbollah's support for Assad was as much an act of loyalty for its fellow member of the "Axis of Resistance" as it was a necessity for its own survival, with Syria acting as its weapons conduit from Iran.

"Under the defunct regime, this area was an economic lifeline for Hezbollah and drug and arms traders traffickers," Madkhana said.

In the building raided by Syrian border security, AFP correspondents saw large bags of captagon pills -- a potent synthetic drug mass-produced under Assad that sparked an addiction crisis in the region.

Both the sanctions-hit ousted government and Hezbollah, which is proscribed as a terrorist organization, have faced accusations of using the captagon trade to finance themselves.

In the months leading up to Assad's December 8 ouster, Hezbollah pulled many of its fighters back to Lebanon to fight an all-out war with Israel.

But it was only after his overthrow that it rushed the majority of its forces and allies out of the country.

Attesting to the speed of the pullout, plates of food were left to rot in the kitchen of one facility.

A damaged clock tower stands in the town of Qusayr in Syria's central Homs province on February 12, 2025. (AFP)

- Drug traffickers -

Snow-speckled dirt tracks leading to the facilities still bear marks left by barricades that smugglers had set up "to delay our advance", Madkhana said.

In recent days, Syrian forces have clashed with "Hezbollah loyalists and regime remnants" in the area, some of them armed with rocket launchers, he added.

Charred vehicles lay by the side of the road, near damaged luxury villas built by drug traffickers, residents told AFP.

Hezbollah provided cover for Lebanese and Syrian smugglers operating at the border, according to residents of the area.

After more than five decades of rule by the Assads, the opposition that once fought his army are now running the country, and that has had a knock-on effect on neighboring Lebanon.

Earlier this week, Madkhana told AFP Syrian forces had started coordinating with the Lebanese army at the border.

Last week, the Lebanese army said it was responding to incoming fire from across the Syrian border.

Syria shares a 330-kilometer (205-mile) border with Lebanon, with no official demarcation, making it ideal turf for smugglers.

People walk behind a destroyed building in the town of Qusayr in Syria's central Homs province on February 12, 2025. (AFP)

- 'Banned from returning' -

Since Assad's ouster, Syrians displaced during the war have started returning home to Qusayr.

After spending almost half of his life as a refugee in northern Lebanon, Hassan Amer, 21, was thrilled to return.

"I was young when I left, I don't know much about Qusayr," he said, painting the walls of his house with help from neighbors and families.

"We returned the day after the regime fell," he said, beaming with pride.

Hezbollah "took over Qusayr and made it theirs while its people were banned from returning," he said, adding that schools and public institutions had been turned into bases.

In 2019, Hezbollah said residents of Qusayr could return home, citing a decision by Assad's government.

Mohammed Nasser, 22, and his mother were among the lucky ones allowed back in 2021.

"My elderly grandfather was alone here... and I was under 18," he said, meaning he was not yet due for conscription.

His father stayed in Lebanon, fearing arrest.

For years, Nasser's family and a couple of others were the only Syrians living in the area, he said, while Lebanese "loyal to Hezbollah lived in the less-damaged houses".

Nasser's 84-year-old grandfather, also named Mohammed, recalled the day Assad and his family fled.

"On liberation day, they fled... and the town's people came back at night, before sunrise, to the sound of the call to prayer," he said.