Doha, September 02 (QNA) - With the approach of the new academic year in September 2025, in Gaza the enclave still experiences death, darkness, and blood, with the complete shortage of education, students, schools, and teachers.

Approximately 700,000 students are still bereft of education and have become displaced and deprived because of the genocide and ethnic cleansing that the Israeli occupation has been relentlessly committing against the Gaza Stip.

While schools worldwide are preparing for this new academic year, the enclave's schools have morphed into piles of charred stones and debris, sinking in a heavy silence overwhelmed by the noise of shells, missiles, and combat aircraft, rather than school bells for morning lineup.

Strikingly, Gaza had been embracing 796 schools with 785,000-plus students, but today over 80 percent of schools have turned into ruins, with 156 schools entirely decimated, while 382 schools, universities, and educational institutions have been dramatically damaged. Even UNRWA-run schools, which should have been a safe shelter, were not spared from this devastation.

The magnitude of this calamity unveils merely piles of rubble, twisted steel, and shattered concrete now standing where once rose beacons of learning and knowledge, institutions that once delivered a promise of a better future for countless young people.

Since the onset of the genocide in the Gaza Strip, more than 17,085 school students and over 1,261 college students have fallen, while upwards of 25,213 school students and 2,671 university students have been wounded, according to the latest figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education covering the period from Oct. 7, 2023, to August 2025.

Those students were dreaming of a better future, but today they remain merely numbers and statistics in the reports of hospitals and international organizations.

Prior to October 2023, the Israeli occupation had been shattering the educational sector in the Gaza enclave through weaponry and politics, but after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the matter escalated far beyond that, with the occupation forces engaging in effacing the entire educational system.

Some UN experts and international organizations have described what is happening in the enclave as an entire scholasticide, implying the deliberate targeting of the educational system's infrastructure, as well as libraries and sites of Palestinian heritage, in addition to the systematic obliteration of education by murdering and detaining teachers and students, a key episode of the entire war of annihilation Israel has been pursuing since 2023.

Scholasticide in Gaza has not exclusively stopped at shelling and flattening schools and universities, but the Israeli occupation forces seem to have been targeting the outstanding academics who could enlighten and advance the next generations, as if it is a war to annihilate the Palestinian future per se.

The calamity that has been wrought on education in Gaza is apparently not confined to the present, but rather its far-reaching consequences will be far more devastating.

Three lost years of education mean an entire generation is growing up in the darkness of ignorance. Children who were in first grade when the war began are now of fourth-grade age and have become illiterate.

High school seniors, once preparing to enter universities, have forfeited critical, irreplaceable years of preparation that would have shaped their qualifications and defined their future.

The psychological and social toll of the genocide waged by the Israeli entity on Gaza is no less grave. Children who saw their schools obliterated and lost their friends and teachers now bear jarring psychological scars.

The crumbling of safety and stability has etched into them fear, anxiety, and despair, wounds neither easily healed nor forgotten. In the long run, this will inflict a severe regression in human development across Palestine.

It will take decades to repair the devastation to the educational sector. Generations to come will pay a staggering price for a genocide that has not only slain the innocent but extinguished their dreams.

Ominously, the genocide's fallout extends beyond education and mental health, rupturing Gaza’s social and economic fabric.

The loss of schools has driven countless children into premature labor under brutal conditions to sustain shattered families, compounding forced child labor.

UN reports indicate that over 80 percent of Gazans now rely on humanitarian aid amid the crumbling domestic economy, while rebuilding schools and securing a safe educational environment remains unattainable without massive international support, as long as the present reality deepens the educational void and entrenches poverty for generations to come.

Amid this darkness, massive destruction, and wreckage in the embattled enclave, faint glimmers of hope persist. In overcrowded tents, children gather around volunteers and teachers conducting lessons in makeshift shelters and mosques, despite harsh conditions and scarce materials.

Some NGOs have supplied tablets for remote learning, and the Ministry of Education announced plans to hold electronic high school exams this September. Yet these efforts collide with power outages, severed internet, and homes reduced to rubble.

Observers assert that such initiatives, though encouraging, remain a drip in the ocean of challenges, triggering the need for drastic solutions starting with an immediate halt to the war, rebuilding the educational infrastructure, and providing a safe environment that enables children to regain their childhood and hopes.

Education for Gaza's children, who have once been victimized by war and deprivation, is the salvation of an entire generation. (QNA)