Attachments
Purpose
The purpose of this response plan is to ensure that the children and youth in Gaza can resume their right to learn as soon as possible after the cessation of hostilities, that all education actors do everything possible during the current hostilities to plan for this, and then support the effective resumption of education in Gaza once hostilities stop.
For it to be effective, this response plan needs to be developed and owned by all actors involved in support of the right of all children and youth in Gaza to education. The Education Cluster’s role is to support this development and to facilitate ownership. This will require continuing and scaling up interventions that are possible before the cessation of hostilities, intervening in the first 6 months of early recovery after the ceasefire, and then for the remainder of the first year as reconstruction begins.
Background: Education before 7 October 2023
In Gaza, 17 years of blockade combined with recurrent conflict have damaged and destroyed an already fragile education infrastructure: increasing pressure on education facilities, disrupting education provision, and impacting the psychosocial wellbeing of children and teachers.
In June 2021, the Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment of the impact of the hostilities from May of that year noted that:
A 15-year-old living in Gaza today [in 2021] would have survived four major conflicts, the May 2021 round being the latest one. Repeated and prolonged exposure to such high levels of stress resulting from the cycle has far reaching ramifications on their physiological and emotional wellbeing, as well as their behavioral and neurological development. These negative effects, in turn, reduce children’s ability to learn in school and become future productive individuals.
According to a study conducted by Save the Children International, after 15 years of blockade, four out of five children in Gaza say they are living with depression, grief and fear.
The severity of the psychological impact on the ability of children in Gaza to learn, had been made worse by a variety of practical, administrative and infrastructural shortcomings.