Gaza students sit exams in tents as nearly all schools lie in ruins
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With 658,000 children locked out of classrooms for two consecutive years, Gaza's official secondary exams begin next month. Teachers and students told Euronews what it means to prepare without textbooks, chairs — or walls.
Hundreds of thousands of students in Gaza are preparing to sit secondary school exams next month in tents, partially destroyed buildings and displacement centres, at a time when nearly all of the territory's educational facilities have been rendered inoperable.
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The Tawjihi — the official secondary school examination taken across the Palestinian territories and Jordan — is scheduled to run from 20 June to 8 July. Around 658,000 school-age children have been without in-person education for more than two consecutive years.
UNICEF estimates that 91.8% of educational facilities in Gaza now require complete reconstruction or major rehabilitation. More than 740 schools are entirely out of service while hundreds more have been converted into shelters for displaced people.
Mohammed Hamdan, director of education in central Gaza, told Euronews preparations were being made under conditions he had never encountered before.
"We are working hard to provide the bare minimum of school furniture so that students can at least sit on a chair while taking their exams, in addition to securing some essential stationery and preparing exam halls at the minimum level needed to meet students' needs," he said.
Central Gaza alone hosts roughly one-third of the territory's secondary school students.
"There are people who cannot imagine a student studying without even having notes or a textbook to follow," Hamdan said. "This is one of the biggest challenges we face."
The Palestinian Ministry of Education has opened registration not only for students who completed the 11th grade in the current academic year but also for those who were unable to complete graduation requirements in the 2023, 2024 and 2025 exam sessions — an attempt to absorb two years of accumulated disruption.
Louay Ballour, a teacher at Fathi al-Balawi School in central Gaza, said the situation was the worst he had seen.
"Almost everything has been destroyed, yet we are trying by every possible means to continue the educational process, even inside tents, even if students have to sit on the ground during lessons," Ballour told Euronews.
He described visible psychological distress among students, particularly in primary grades.
"There are clear psychological disorders among students because of the war. We try to integrate them into the educational process, especially in the primary stages, to motivate them and return them to the path of normal life."
For many students, finding somewhere to study has required physical displacement in its own right.
Mohammed Kamal, who was forced from his home in Jabalia in northern Gaza to Al-Bureij in the central part of the Strip, said the contrast with his education before the Israel-Hamas war that ended with a ceasefire in October 2025 was stark.
"We studied inside a school, went early and finished early. Today we leave late and return late, and receive only three or four lessons instead of the six we used to have daily," Kamal told Euronews.
"We lost two academic years and could not complete our education, so now we are trying to make up for what we missed," Hassan al-Sawafiri, who moved from northern Gaza to the south in pursuit of continued schooling, explained.
More than half of all internally displaced students are now concentrated in the south, against 35% in the north, deepening inequalities in access to education across the territory.
At least 411 teachers had been killed according to OCHA figures from August 2024 — a toll that continued to rise as the war persisted through most of 2025.
A November 2025 UNESCO assessment found that more than 1,100 higher education workers had been killed, detained or injured since the war began in October 2023. UNICEF has stated in its reports that virtually all university buildings have suffered partial or total damage.
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