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Fear of ‘Lost Generation’ as Gaza School Year Begins with All Classes Shut 

Children write in notebooks by the rubble of destroyed buildings near a tent being used as a make-shift educational center for primary education students in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip on September 8, 2024 amid the ongoing war in the Palestinian territory between Israel and Hamas. (AFP)
Children write in notebooks by the rubble of destroyed buildings near a tent being used as a make-shift educational center for primary education students in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip on September 8, 2024 amid the ongoing war in the Palestinian territory between Israel and Hamas. (AFP)
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Fear of ‘Lost Generation’ as Gaza School Year Begins with All Classes Shut 

Children write in notebooks by the rubble of destroyed buildings near a tent being used as a make-shift educational center for primary education students in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip on September 8, 2024 amid the ongoing war in the Palestinian territory between Israel and Hamas. (AFP)
Children write in notebooks by the rubble of destroyed buildings near a tent being used as a make-shift educational center for primary education students in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip on September 8, 2024 amid the ongoing war in the Palestinian territory between Israel and Hamas. (AFP)

The new school year in the Palestinian territories officially began on Monday, with all schools in Gaza shut after 11 months of war and no sign of a ceasefire.

In its ongoing assault on the Palestinian territory, Israel announced new orders to residents of the north Gaza Strip to leave their homes, in response to rockets fired into Israel.

Umm Zaki's son Moataz, 15, was supposed to begin tenth grade. Instead he woke up in their tent in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza and was sent to fetch a container of water from more than a kilometer away.

"Usually, such a day would be a day of celebration, seeing the children in the new uniform, going to school, and dreaming of becoming doctors and engineers. Today all we hope is that the war ends before we lose any of them," the mother of five told Reuters by text message.

The Palestinian Education Ministry said all Gaza schools were shut and 90% of them had been destroyed or damaged in Israel's assault on the territory, launched after Hamas gunmen attacked Israeli towns in October last year.

The UN Palestinian aid agency UNRWA, which runs around half of Gaza's schools, has turned as many of them as it can into emergency shelters housing thousands of displaced families.

"The longer the children stay out of school the more difficult it is for them to catch up on their lost learning and the more prone they are to becoming a lost generation, falling prey to exploitation including child marriage, child labor, and recruitment into armed groups," UNRWA Director of Communications Juliette Touma told Reuters.

In addition to the 625,000 Gazans already registered for school who would be missing classes, another 58,000 six-year-olds should have registered to start first grade this year, the education ministry said.

Last month, UNRWA launched a back-to-learning program in 45 of its shelters, with teachers setting up games, drama, arts, music and sports activities to help with children's mental health.

'THE SPECIFIED AREA HAS BEEN WARNED'

Nearly all of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been forced from their homes at least once, and some have had to flee as many as 10 times.

In the latest evacuation order, Israel told residents of an area in the northern Gaza Strip they must leave their homes, following the firing of rockets into southern Israel the previous day.

"To all those in the specified area. Terrorist organizations are once again firing rockets at the State of Israel and carrying out terrorist acts from this area. The specified area has been warned many times in the past. The specified area is considered a dangerous combat zone," an Israeli military spokesperson said in Arabic on X.

The United Nations urged Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip to attend medical facilities to get children under the age of 10 years old vaccinated against polio. Limited pauses in fighting have been held to allow the vaccination campaign, which aims to reach 640,000 children in Gaza after the territory's first polio case in around 25 years.

UN officials said the campaign in the southern and central Gaza Strip had so far reached more than half of the children there needing the drops. A second round of vaccination will be required four weeks after the first.

Health officials said on Monday two separate Israeli airstrikes had killed seven people in central Gaza, while another strike killed one man in Khan Younis further south.

The armed wings of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad said they fought against Israeli forces in several areas across the Gaza Strip with anti-tank rockets and mortar fire.

The Israeli military said forces continued to dismantle military infrastructure and killed dozens of fighters in the past days, including senior Hamas and Islamic Jihad commanders.

The war was triggered on Oct. 7 when the Hamas group that ran Gaza attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. Israel's subsequent assault on Gaza has killed more than 40,900 Palestinians, according to the enclave's health ministry.

The two warring sides each blame the other for the failure so far to reach a ceasefire that would end the fighting and see the release of hostages.

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Will Israel’s Interceptors Outlast Iran’s Missiles?

The Israeli Iron Dome air defense system fires to intercept missiles during an Iranian attack over Tel Aviv, Israel, early Wednesday, June 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
The Israeli Iron Dome air defense system fires to intercept missiles during an Iranian attack over Tel Aviv, Israel, early Wednesday, June 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
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Will Israel’s Interceptors Outlast Iran’s Missiles?

The Israeli Iron Dome air defense system fires to intercept missiles during an Iranian attack over Tel Aviv, Israel, early Wednesday, June 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
The Israeli Iron Dome air defense system fires to intercept missiles during an Iranian attack over Tel Aviv, Israel, early Wednesday, June 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)

Israel has a world-leading missile interception system but its bank of interceptors is finite. Now, as the war drags on, Israel is firing interceptors faster than it can produce them.

On Thursday, The New York Times reporters spoke to current and former Israeli officials about the strengths and weaknesses of Israeli air defense.

Aside from a potentially game-changing US intervention that shapes the fate of Iran’s nuclear program, two factors will help decide the length of the Israel-Iran war: Israel’s reserve of missile interceptors and Iran’s stock of long-range missiles.

Since Iran started retaliating against Israel’s fire last week, Israel’s world-leading air defense system has intercepted most incoming Iranian ballistic missiles, giving the Israeli Air Force more time to strike Iran without incurring major losses at home.

But now, as the war drags on, Israel is firing interceptors faster than it can produce them. That has raised questions within the Israeli security establishment about whether the country will run low on air defense missiles before Iran uses up its ballistic arsenal, according to eight current and former officials.

Already, Israel’s military has had to conserve its use of interceptors and is giving greater priority to the defense of densely populated areas and strategic infrastructure, according to the officials. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak more freely.

Interceptors are “not grains of rice,” said Brig. Gen. Ran Kochav, who commanded Israel’s air defense system until 2021 and still serves in the military reserve. “The number is finite.”

“If a missile is supposed to hit refineries in Haifa, it’s clear that it’s more important to intercept that missile than one that will hit the Negev desert,” General Kochav said.

Conserving Israel’s interceptors is “a challenge,” he added. “We can make it, but it’s a challenge.”

Asked for comment on the limits of its interceptor arsenal, the Israeli military said in a brief statement that it “is prepared and ready to handle any scenario and is operating defensively and offensively to remove threats to Israeli civilians.”

No Israeli official would divulge the number of interceptors left at Israel’s disposal; the revelation of such a closely guarded secret could give Iran a military advantage.

The answer will affect Israel’s ability to sustain a long-term, attritional war. The nature of the war will partly be decided by whether Trump decides to join Israel in attacking Iran’s nuclear enrichment site at Fordo, in northern Iran, or whether Iran decides to give up its enrichment program to prevent such an intervention.

But the war’s endgame will also be shaped by how long both sides can sustain the damage to their economies, as well as the damage to national morale caused by a growing civilian death toll.

Israel relies on at least seven kinds of air defense. Most of them involve automated systems that use radar to detect incoming missiles and then provide officers with suggestions of how to intercept them.

Military officials have seconds to react to some short-range fire, but minutes to judge the response to long-range attacks. At times, the automated systems do not offer recommendations, leaving officers to make decisions on their own, General Kochav said.

The Arrow system intercepts long-range missiles at higher altitudes; the David’s Sling system intercepts them at lower altitudes; while the Iron Dome takes out shorter-range rockets, usually fired from Gaza, or the fragments of missiles already intercepted by other defense systems.

The United States has supplied at least two more defense systems, some of them fired from ships in the Mediterranean, and Israel is also trying out a new and relatively untested laser beam. Finally, fighter jets are deployed to shoot down slow-moving drones.

Some Israelis feel it is time to wrap up the war before Israel’s defenses are tested too severely.

At least 24 civilians have been killed by Iran’s strikes, and more than 800 have been injured. Some key infrastructure, including oil refineries in northern Israel, has been hit, along with civilian homes. A hospital in southern Israel was struck on Thursday morning.

Already high by Israeli standards, the death toll could rise sharply if the Israeli military is forced to limit its general use of interceptors in order to guarantee the long-term protection of a few strategic sites like the Dimona nuclear reactor in southern Israel or the military headquarters in Tel Aviv.

“Now that Israel has succeeded in striking most of its nuclear targets in Iran, Israel has a window of two or three days to declare the victory and end the war,” said Zohar Palti, a former senior officer in the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency.

“When planning how to defend Israel in future wars, no one envisaged a scenario in which we would be fighting on so many fronts and defending against so many rounds of ballistic missiles,” said Palti, who was for years involved in Israel’s defensive planning.

Others are confident that Israel will be able to solve the problem by destroying most of Iran’s missile launchers, preventing the Iranian military from using the stocks that it still has.

Iran has both fixed and mobile launchers, scattered across its territory, according to two Israeli officials. Some of its missiles are stored underground, where they are harder to destroy, while others are in aboveground caches, the officials said.

The Israeli military says it has destroyed more than a third of the launchers. Officials and experts say that has already limited the number of missiles that Iran can fire in a single attack.

US officials said Israel’s strikes against the launchers have decimated Iran’s ability to fire its missiles and hurt its ability to create large-scale barrages.

“The real issue is the number of launchers, more than the number of missiles,” said Asaf Cohen, a former Israeli commander who led the Iran department in Israel’s military intelligence directorate.

“The more of them that are hit, the harder it will be for them to launch barrages,” Cohen added. “If they realize they have a problem with launch capacity, they’ll shift to harassment: one or two missiles every so often, aimed at two different areas simultaneously.”

The New York Times