*
Israel issues new evacuation order for northern Gaza
*
58,000 children in Gaza were due to start first grade of primary school on Monday.
*
“Normally, such a day would be a day of celebration.”
Nidal Al-Mughrabi
CAIRO, Sept 9 – The new school term in the Palestinian territories officially began on Monday, but all schools in the Gaza Strip were closed following 11 months of war and no sign of a ceasefire.
Israel continues its attacks on the Palestinian territory and has issued new evacuation orders for residents of the northern Gaza Strip in response to rockets fired towards Israel.
Umm Zaki’s 15-year-old son, Moataz, was supposed to be in 10th grade when he woke up in his tent in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, and ordered to retrieve a container of water from more than a kilometre away.
“Usually a day like this is a celebration when children wear their new uniforms, go to school and dream of becoming doctors or engineers. Today we just hope that the war ends before we lose any of our children,” the mother of five told Reuters in a text message.
The Palestinian Education Ministry said all schools in the Gaza Strip were closed, 90 percent of them destroyed or damaged in Israeli attacks on the territory, which began after Hamas militants attacked Israeli towns last October.
The U.N. Palestinian aid agency UNRWA, which runs about half of the schools in the Gaza Strip, is converting as many as it can into emergency shelters for thousands of displaced families.
“The longer children are out of school, the harder it will be for them to make up for lost learning and the more likely they will become a lost generation and fall prey to exploitation, including child marriage, child labour and recruitment into armed groups,” Juliette Touma, UNRWA’s director of communications, told Reuters.
According to the Ministry of Education, an additional 58,000 six-year-olds need to register to start first grade this year, in addition to the 625,000 Gaza residents already registered to attend school but unable to attend classes.
Last month, UNRWA launched a back-to-learning programme in 45 evacuation centres, with teachers organising games, drama, art, music and sports activities to help children’s mental health.
“A warning has been issued in the designated area.”
Nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been forced to flee their homes at least once, and some have had to flee as many as ten times.
In its latest evacuation order, Israel told residents of the northern Gaza Strip to leave their homes after rockets were fired into southern Israel the previous day.
“To all people in the designated areas: terrorist organizations have again fired rockets into the State of Israel and are carrying out terrorist acts from this area. The designated areas have been subject to multiple warnings in the past. The designated areas are considered to be dangerous combat zones,” an Israeli military spokesman said in Arabic on Sunday.
The United Nations has urged Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip to visit health facilities to have children under the age of 10 vaccinated against polio. There has been a temporary pause in fighting for the vaccination campaign, which aims to vaccinate 640,000 children in the Gaza Strip after the first reported cases of polio in nearly 25 years.
UN officials said the campaign in southern and central Gaza has so far reached more than half of the children in the area who need the vaccine – a second dose is required four weeks after the first.
Health officials said on Monday two Israeli airstrikes killed seven people in central Gaza, while another strike further south in Khan Yunis killed one man.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad militant groups said they fought Israeli forces with anti-tank rockets and mortars in several areas of the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli army said its forces continued to dismantle military infrastructure, killing dozens of fighters, including senior members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, in recent days.
The war began on Oct. 7 when Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages, according to an Israeli tally. Subsequent Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip have killed more than 40,900 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Strip’s Health Ministry.
Both warring sides have blamed the other for failing to reach a ceasefire agreement to end the fighting and release the hostages.
This article has been generated from an automated news agency feed without any modifications to the text.