He arranged the chairs, found a blackboard, and planned the day’s lesson: How do you say “I love Palestine” in English? In the courtyard of a school-turned-camp for displaced people in the Gaza Strip, Tarek al-Ennabi wants to offer his students a model of normality, AFP begins its report.

On October 7, Hamas, which seized power in Gaza in 2007, launched an unprecedented attack on Israel, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli officials.

The next day, Sunday, the first day of the week in Gaza, Palestinian children stopped going to school.

Their schools were bombed by Israel in response to a Hamas attack. They were turned into temporary shelters for thousands of displaced people who began to flee or were abandoned by teachers and students who themselves were forced to leave.

Professor Annabi, a 25-year-old English literature graduate, himself dropped out of his UN-run school – al-Ghurriya, or “Freedom” in Arabic – in Gaza City, which was besieged by Israeli tanks at the climax. hostilities

After 48 days of bombing, more than 15,000 dead, according to the Hamas government, and more than 1.7 million people displaced, he decided on the first day of a truce on November 24, the extension of which is uncertain every night, to return displaced children to school in Rafahu

Sleeps at school

In classrooms, families sleep on mattresses propped up under desks. In the corridors, others are huddled inside, trying to hide from the bitter cold.

Then we go to the playground for a private class of about forty boys and girls from all levels of elementary school. The resources – chalk, sponges and tin – were bought with small donations collected here and there from the settlers.

With a neatly trimmed black beard, jeans and a beige sweater, the teacher watches his students’ efforts to write “I love Palestine” in Arabic and English.

Ten-year-old Layan undertakes to carefully reproduce all the letters. We left Gaza City because the (Israeli) occupiers bombed our house, so now we sleep in this school,” says a little girl wrapped in a gray coat decorated with pink butterflies.

“Uncle Tarek teaches us English. When I grow up, I’d like to be an English teacher, too,” she continued cheerfully.

Safa, for her part, tries to say another phrase: “My name is Safa” in English, under the gaze of Tarek al-Annabi.

Speaking “to the world”

For him, teaching English in the midst of war is an act of war.

Above all, he told AFP, “we put smiles back on children’s faces and let them find their notebooks.” And, he adds, “we help them speak English so they can be heard in the world.”

He currently teaches 40 students in the morning and another 40 in the afternoon, but says he hopes to recruit more volunteers to his cause.

In the Gaza Strip, a small and overpopulated territory ravaged by poverty – 81.5% of residents are poor and 46.6% unemployed – almost half of the population is under 15, according to the UN.

But after 17 years of Israeli blockade, especially of building materials, and constant wars that have destroyed many schools, these children and teenagers have no classrooms.

Even in peacetime, the UN, which runs more than 180 schools in the area, organizes complicated timetables: in some units, classes are divided into three shifts so that all children can benefit from a few hours of learning a day.

In the ongoing war, the Hamas government insists, 266 schools have been partially destroyed and 67 have been rendered completely unusable. (AFP)