Gaza’s Education Crisis: A System-Wide Collapse Threatens a Generation

For three years now, most of Gaza’s children have had little to no access to school. A child who was seven when the war began is now nine or ten, and has spent a third of the life they can remember waiting for school to resume.

Anera’s new report, Gaza’s Education Crisis, tells the story of what the war has done to education in Gaza and what it will take to rebuild. It draws on interviews and group discussions with teachers, parents, students, education officials and community members across Gaza, alongside data from the UN and other partners.

What the report finds

Before the war, Gaza’s schools and universities served more than 750,000 learners. Today, nearly every school has been damaged, destroyed or turned into a shelter for displaced families. More than nine in ten school buildings would need major repairs or full reconstruction before they could function again.

The damage goes beyond buildings:

• Children have lost years of learning. Some have missed months of school and others have missed years, and the gaps are uneven. Teenagers are at risk of leaving school for good as they are pulled toward work or household duties.
• Trauma makes learning harder. Teachers describe children who are anxious, withdrawn or unable to concentrate. “A hungry child cannot concentrate or understand,” one teacher told Anera.
• Teachers are struggling too. Many are unpaid or irregularly paid, and are working through their own loss and displacement with almost no classroom materials.
• Some children are left further behind. Girls, children with disabilities, displaced families and orphaned children face the steepest barriers.

Some learning continues, but it isn’t enough

Across Gaza, nearly 400 temporary learning spaces now operate in tents, damaged buildings and community centers. They reach roughly 220,000 learners, about a third of the school-aged population. Most children attend only about three hours a day, three days a week. The report is clear that these spaces keep children connected to routine and to each other, but cannot replace a real school system.

A path forward

The report lays out a plan in three overlapping phases, all of which need to begin now:

1. Stabilization (duration: 6 months): safe learning spaces, free supplies, reliable pay for teachers, and psychosocial support in every learning space.
2. Recovery (duration: 6 to 24 months): catch-up learning for children who have missed years, teacher training, and the restoration of universities where possible. 
3. Rebuilding (duration: 2 to 5+ years): build schools and universities for Gaza’s future and address longstanding gaps like overcrowding and underfunding. The World Bank, European Union and United Nations estimate the cost at about $3.8 billion over five years.

Anera’s work

Since January 2026, Anera has set up 118 temporary learning spaces serving 14,883 children. We have distributed 260 literacy kits, trained 30 teachers, and provided 2,828 psychosocial support sessions for 62,813 children. 

Hope for the future

Through all of it, the people of Gaza keep showing up. Teachers keep teaching, often without pay. Parents keep finding ways to help their children learn. Communities keep gathering children for lessons in tents and mosque courtyards. In the words of Lama, a teacher in an Anera-supported learning space: “We’ve lost so much, but this space gives us a purpose. It’s a reminder that even in chaos, we can still learn, still dream.”

Every day, in the hardest of circumstances, Gaza’s students and teachers show the courage and the love of learning, and of life, that recovery will be built on.

Read the full report.