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Gaza Schoolgirl Longs to Return to Class as War Disrupts New Academic Year

A displaced Palestinian student, Rama Abu Seif, speaks during an interview with Reuters, at a school where she shelters with her family, as war disrupts a new academic year, in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, September 2, 2024. REUTERS/Hussam Al-Masri Purchase Licensing Rights
A displaced Palestinian student, Rama Abu Seif, speaks during an interview with Reuters, at a school where she shelters with her family, as war disrupts a new academic year, in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, September 2, 2024. REUTERS/Hussam Al-Masri Purchase Licensing Rights
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Gaza Schoolgirl Longs to Return to Class as War Disrupts New Academic Year

A displaced Palestinian student, Rama Abu Seif, speaks during an interview with Reuters, at a school where she shelters with her family, as war disrupts a new academic year, in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, September 2, 2024. REUTERS/Hussam Al-Masri Purchase Licensing Rights
A displaced Palestinian student, Rama Abu Seif, speaks during an interview with Reuters, at a school where she shelters with her family, as war disrupts a new academic year, in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, September 2, 2024. REUTERS/Hussam Al-Masri Purchase Licensing Rights

Gaza schoolgirl Rama Abu Seif longs to return to a classroom to study but it is now a dormitory for families displaced by war. Her books were burned to light fires in clay ovens. Her school bag is stuffed with clothes in case she needs to flee an Israeli bombardment quickly.

The 12-year-old missed grade six last year and will be deprived of grade seven as the war between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas rages on.

"Of course, the children who are my age and younger than me, they all want to go back to northern (Gaza) and relive their school days, study and play at school, but all of that is gone and we lost two years because of the war," she said.

There are no prospects for Rama and many other children to return to school any time soon in the Gaza Strip, which has been laid to waste by Israeli bombardments.

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.

Instead of playing sports and games in the school playground, Rama waits in long lines for her turn to collect water, which is often dirty and undrinkable.

And there is no end in sight.

The United States, Qatar and Egypt have failed to mediate a deal that would secure a ceasefire and the return of hostages held in Gaza by Hamas, according to Reuters.

The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered last October when Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. Israel's subsequent assault on the Hamas-governed enclave has killed over 40,600 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry. Most of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been displaced, triggering a hunger and health crisis in the enclave.

Rama and her classmates can only recall better days in an impoverished yet once vibrant Gaza, one of the most densely populated areas in the world.

Gaza and the occupied West Bank have internationally high literacy levels, and the under-resourced education system was a rare source of hope and pride among Palestinians.

Since the war erupted, Gazans have fled up, down and across the territory, often repeatedly, seeking safety and a place to sleep in schools like the one in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza where Rama and her family live.

But nowhere is safe.

In early August, an Israeli airstrike on a Gaza City school compound housing displaced Palestinian families killed around 100 people, Gaza's emergency services said. Israel said the toll was inflated and 19 fighters were among the dead.

"In the past we would open the bag and find the book in it, so we would take the book and study," Rama said.

"But now we open the bag and find clothes inside it, clothes for displacement that we take with us wherever we go, from place to place."

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Challenges of the Gaza Humanitarian Aid Pier Offer Lessons for the US Army

A truck carries humanitarian aid across Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, near the Gaza coast, May 19, 2024. US Army Central/Handout via REUTERS
A truck carries humanitarian aid across Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, near the Gaza coast, May 19, 2024. US Army Central/Handout via REUTERS
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Challenges of the Gaza Humanitarian Aid Pier Offer Lessons for the US Army

A truck carries humanitarian aid across Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, near the Gaza coast, May 19, 2024. US Army Central/Handout via REUTERS
A truck carries humanitarian aid across Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, near the Gaza coast, May 19, 2024. US Army Central/Handout via REUTERS

It was their most challenging mission.
US Army soldiers in the 7th Transportation Brigade had previously set up a pier during training and in exercises overseas but never had dealt with the wild combination of turbulent weather, security threats and sweeping personnel restrictions that surrounded the Gaza humanitarian aid project.
Designed as a temporary solution to get badly needed food and supplies to desperate Palestinians, the so-called Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore system, or JLOTS, faced a series of setbacks over the spring and summer. It managed to send more than 20 million tons of aid ashore for people in Gaza facing famine during the Israel-Hamas war.
Service members struggled with what Col. Sam Miller, who was commander during the project, called the biggest “organizational leadership challenge” he had ever experienced.
Speaking to The Associated Press after much of the unit returned home, Miller said the Army learned a number of lessons during the four-month mission. It began when President Joe Biden announced in his State of the Union speech in March that the pier would be built and lasted through July 17, when the Pentagon formally declared that the mission was over and the pier was being permanently dismantled.
The Army is reviewing the $230 million pier operation and what it learned from the experience. One of the takeaways, according to a senior Army official, is that the unit needs to train under more challenging conditions to be better prepared for bad weather and other security issues it faced. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because assessments of the pier project have not been publicly released.
In a report released this week, the inspector general for the US Agency for International Development said Biden ordered the pier's construction even as USAID staffers expressed concerns that it would be difficult and undercut a push to persuade Israel to open “more efficient” land crossings to get food into Gaza.
The Defense Department said the pier “achieved its goal of providing an additive means of delivering high volumes of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza to help address the acute humanitarian crisis.” The US military knew from the outset “there would be challenges as part of this in this complex emergency,” the statement added.
The Biden administration had set a goal of the US sea route and pier providing food to feed 1.5 million people for 90 days. It fell short, bringing in enough to feed about 450,000 people for a month before shutting down, the USAID inspector general's report said.
The Defense Department’s watchdog also is doing an evaluation of the project.
Beefing up training Army soldiers often must conduct their exercises under difficult conditions designed to replicate war. Learning from the Gaza project — which was the first time the Army set up a pier in actual combat conditions — leaders say they need to find ways to make the training even more challenging.
One of the biggest difficulties of the Gaza pier mission was that no US troops could step ashore — a requirement set by Biden. Instead, US service members were scattered across a floating city of more than 20 ships and platforms miles offshore that had to have food, water, beds, medical care and communications.
Every day, said Miller, there were as many as 1,000 trips that troops and other personnel made from ship to boat to pier to port and back.
“We were moving personnel around the sea and up to the Trident pier on a constant basis,” Miller said. “And every day, there was probably about a thousand movements taking place, which is quite challenging, especially when you have sea conditions that you have to manage.”
Military leaders, he said, had to plan three or four days ahead to ensure they had everything they needed because the trip from the pier to their “safe haven” at Israel's port of Ashdod was about 30 nautical miles.
The trip over and back could take up to 12 hours, in part because the Army had to sail about 5 miles out to sea between Ashdod and the pier to stay a safe distance from shore as they passed Gaza City, Miller said.
Normally, Miller said, when the Army establishes a pier, the unit sets up a command onshore, making it much easier to store and access supplies and equipment or gather troops to lay out orders for the day.
Communication difficulties While his command headquarters was on the US military ship Roy P. Benavidez, Miller said he was constantly moving with his key aides to the various ships and the pier.
“I slept and ate on every platform out there,” he said.
The US Army official concurred that a lot of unexpected logistical issues came up that a pier operation may not usually include.
Because the ships had to use the Ashdod port and a number of civilian workers under terms of the mission, contracts had to be negotiated and written. Agreements had to be worked out so vessels could dock, and workers needed to be hired for tasks that troops couldn't do, including moving aid onto the shore.
Communications were a struggle.
“Some of our systems on the watercraft can be somewhat slower with bandwidth, and you’re not able to get up to the classified level,” Miller said.
He said he used a huge spreadsheet to keep track of all the ships and floating platforms, hundreds of personnel and the movement of millions of tons of aid from Cyprus to the Gaza shore.
When bad weather broke the pier apart, they had to set up ways to get the pieces moved to Ashdod and repaired. Over time, he said, they were able to hire more tugs to help move sections of the pier more quickly.
Some of the pier's biggest problems — including the initial reluctance of aid agencies to distribute supplies throughout Gaza and later safety concerns from the violence — may not apply in other operations where troops may be quickly setting up a pier to get military forces ashore for an assault or disaster response.
“There’s tons of training value and experience that every one of the soldiers, sailors and others got out of this,” Miller said. "There’s going to be other places in the world that may have similar things, but they won’t be as tough as the things that we just went through.”
When the time comes, he said, “we’re going to be much better at doing this type of thing.”
One bit of information could have given the military a better heads-up about the heavy seas that would routinely hammer the pier. Turns out, said the Army official, there was a Gaza surf club, and its headquarters was near where they built the pier.
That "may be an indicator that the waves there were big,” the official said.