Post-war counselling awaits Gaza children going back to school

GAZA — Some 500,000 children returned on Sunday to school in the Gaza Strip, where many will be given psychological counselling before regular studies begin after a devastating 50-day Israeli aggression on the coastal enclave.

The opening of the school year had been delayed for three weeks because of damage to more than 250 schools and the use of about 90 UN educational facilities as shelters for tens of thousands of residents displaced by fighting, the United Nations and local authorities said.

“The top priority now is making sure that after a period of psychosocial support, including the use of theatre for development techniques, our students can return to their regular curricula,” said Pierre Krähenbühl, head of UNRWA, which runs more than 200 Gaza schools.

He said UNRWA has employed over 200 counsellors who would engage with the approximately 240,000 students in its schools, with a transition to standard studies scheduled in a week.

A coalition of international and local non-government agencies and the Palestinian education ministry will also help provide psychosocial support to another quarter-million students in Gaza’s public schools.

Health officials in the Gaza Strip, an enclave run by the Hamas Islamist group, said more than 2,100 people, mostly civilians were killed, among them 500 children, in the war.

Israel, which launched its Gaza offensive on July 8 with the declared aim of halting cross-border rocket fire, said 67 of its soldiers and six civilians, including a four-year-old boy, were killed.

At a girls’ school in Shejaia, a Gaza neighbourhood where hundreds of houses were damaged or destroyed and 72 people died in fierce fighting, a sign bearing the name of a student killed in the conflict was placed symbolically on an empty chair.

It read: “Martyr Ghalya Al Helu, ninth grade.”

The head teacher, addressing the morning assembly in the bullet and shrapnel-scarred school, told the students that her deputy also had been killed.

Zeyad Thabet, Gaza’s deputy education minister, said 26 schools in the territory were destroyed during the war.

On Thursday, a report by the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) group accused Israel of committing war crimes by attacking three UNRWA-run schools, killing 45 Palestinians, including 17 children, in or near those facilities.

Israeli government and military spokespersons declined comment. 

But during the fighting, Israel rejected preliminary HRW findings that it committed war crimes and said the group should focus on Hamas putting Palestinian civilians in harm’s way by “using residential areas as launching points for attacks and for weapons storage”.

The UN acknowledged that weaponry was found at three of its Gaza schools — not the same facilities that were the subject of the HRW report — and condemned fighters for storing arms there.

UNRWA said some 64,000 refugees were still being housed in 20 Gaza schools.