There were approximately 625,000 students in school in the Gaza Strip before the war, and the entire educational system in the Strip had stopped due to the continuous bombing. According to figures issued by the United Nations, by mid-December, 352 school buildings had been damaged. That is, more than 70 percent of the educational infrastructure in the sector. At the same time, many of the schools that are still standing have been turned into shelters, including more than 150 schools affiliated with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and about 130 schools run by local authorities. Most of the main universities in the Gaza Strip were destroyed, and many of them were occupied and converted into headquarters for the occupying army. Libraries, including those in universities, were burned and destroyed by the occupation forces, and all forms and institutions of cultural work were systematically destroyed. The raids crushed dozens of cultural institutions that played a major role in cultural production in the Gaza Strip, and destroyed most archaeological sites, including many mosques and churches. Which dates back thousands of years and stores part of the city’s identity.

The restart of the education sector is fundamentally threatened by the apartheid state’s declared plans to impose education that conforms to its conditions on Palestinian identity and culture, with which many major countries agree. While the Palestinians in Gaza work for educational, cultural, and human awareness work that revolves around their identity, history, struggle, and collective awareness, which enables them to build a collective human memory around the horror of the massacre to which they were exposed, and around the sacrifices they made and the methods of their society’s steadfastness in the face of all of this, in a way that reflects their cultural and societal diversity. It enables different sectors to tell and teach their stories about the living and resilient Palestinian existence.