Some 200,000 Gaza children returned to school on Saturday for the first time since Israel's offensive, many having lost family members, their home and their sense of security. The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) reopened all its 221 schools which educate Palestinians in the territory and provided shelter to tens of thousands of people during the fighting. “Good morning! Still alive?” excited teenage girls asked each other as their class, all in white headscarves, lined up in the yard shortly after dawn at Beach Preparatory School. At Al-Zukur school in Beit Lahiya the children swarmed into the wide courtyard with their oversized backpacks, noisily running and playing beneath an upper-storey classroom scorched by an Israeli shell. It was one of three schools sheltering displaced people, which were hit by Israeli fire during the war. UN chief Ban Ki-moon called the attacks “outrageous” and demanded those responsible be held to account. As the hundreds of children were slowly brought to order at Al-Zukur, it soon became clear that many of them bore the unseen wounds of the war, in which more than 1,330 Palestinians were killed, nearly a third of them children. “Come forward if your mother or father was martyred,” headmaster Riad Maliha announced through a megaphone to the classes lined up outside in the morning assembly. “Come forward if your house was destroyed.” More than 20 students walked to the front to register with UN officials so their families could receive aid, including Anas Abbas, a shy 12-year-old boy. Maliha, the headmaster, says the first few days of school will be given over to counselling, with teachers trying to help the children express themselves. “In the classes the teachers will encourage them to talk about what happened, or to draw pictures or to write about it,” he said. UNRWA, which provides basic aid and services to most of the 1.5 million people living in Gaza, employs some 200 counselors and is looking to recruit more in the wake of the war. Older Gazans who want compromise with Israel regret the high price of this “resistance”. But in the classrooms at Beach Prep, any suggestion of making peace now was dismissed. Asked if the current ceasefire would endure, most students said they did not think so. Asked if there could be peace with Israel one day, most said there could not. None said it was possible. Critics warn that the violence of Israel's offensive will create a newly radicalized generation. Hamas relief On Friday Hamas officials handed out emergency relief to families as part of its pledge to spend $52 million of the group's fiunds to held restore life in Gaza, at the same time declaring it was back in control of Gaza. Hamas would include $1,300 for a death in the family, $650 for an injury, $5,200 for a destroyed house and $2,600 for a damaged house. More than 4,000 houses were destroyed and about 20,000 damaged, according to independent estimates. Hamas is not ready to recognize Israel's right to exist. But it is prepared to make a long-term truce, of up to 15 years, and to accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, if Israel ends its occupation.
