in Gaza, a nearly thousand-year-old school reopens its doors to admit children

So that children can learn, teachers are renovating an old school in Gaza’s Old City.

How can we resume normal life when 3% of the population is dead, according to figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health, linked to Hamas, and when 80% of buildings are razed to the ground according to the UN? There are few permanent shelters and no more schools. So, to put children back to work, out-of-work teachers rehabilitated a nearly thousand-year-old building that had not been used for more than 70 years in Gaza’s old city.

Al-Kamaliya School welcomed its first students in 1207: “Coming here, I felt like I was living in 1948, during the Nakba. The only thing missing was the old fashioned clothes.” The school closed 622 years later, in 1949, a few months after what 9-year-old Khalid called the school. “Nakba”“catastrophe”, and the forced displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians, leading to Israeli independence.

At that time, the UN took over the education of refugees in new buildings. According to Unicef, 95% of these schools experienced total or partial destruction over the past two years. “We want to stand up, fight against illiteracy and ignorance. All the scourges that Israel puts on us”assured Assad Ahmed Al-Sawafiri, director of the school. “We looked for lots of places but they were all destroyed. Then we looked for land to put up tents to use as classrooms. We couldn’t find any free space.”

“We finally found this abandoned place. We cleaned it up and 800 years after it was founded, it became a school again.”

Assad Ahmed Al-Sawafiri, school director

at franceinfo

An institution that currently lacks everything, and accepts too many students, like 17-year-old Lana: “We don’t have pens, pencils, notebooks, chairs and the classrooms are crowded. There are 60 students in the same room and we only study three days a week.” Nearly 750 students share space and rotate throughout the week. Most of the 50 teachers are volunteers.