On October 17, in Deir el-Balah, a fourteen-year-old named Mohammed Hamad finished his lessons at a makeshift school and started home through the al-Baraka neighbourhood. His brother Abdullah, who is ten, walked beside him. An Israeli strike hit the road they were on. Mohammed was killed, and a man with him. Abdullah survived.
Maram Humaid opens her report for Al Jazeera with that walk home, and it is where any account of Gaza’s school year has to begin: with the distance between a tent classroom and a family tent, and with what can happen to a child on the way.
The father in the tent
Mohammed was the third child of Riyad Hamad, 44. He was in the eighth grade and among the best pupils in his class. His father, speaking from the tent where the family now lives, said of him: “He was not just my son, he was my friend.” The boy used to ask him, “How am I with you?”
Then the father said the thing that fathers in wars keep saying, in every language, because nobody ever answers it: “The child is supposed to bury his father, not the father bury his child.”
Morning assembly in Jabalia
The Muradiya school sits in the al-Ghubari area, west of Jabalia al-Balad, in the north of the Strip. It is a school of twenty tents and about 1,000 pupils, and it stands close to the Yellow Line, the boundary behind which Israeli forces remain under the ceasefire. On October 21, at about half past ten in the morning, girls were forming their lines for assembly when shots came in.
Suad Abd Rabbo, a fourth-grader, was hit as she stood in line. The bullet lodged above her knee, among nerves and tendons, and surgeons left it there because removing it risked paralysing her. Her mother, Aliaa, remembered only how she reacted: “I ran out barefoot.” When Suad came round from the anaesthetic, she recited a dictation passage from class, one that begins: “O symbol of generosity and resilience…”
She cannot walk. She needs surgery abroad, which Israeli controls on leaving Gaza make unlikely. She asks: “Why did this happen to me? Why was I targeted? What did I do?” After dark, her family’s tent in the north often comes under fire. Her mother regrets bringing them back to Jabalia from the south.
A fifth-grader, Amina Khader, suffered a minor wound to the abdomen. Her father, Khaled, carried her to a clinic and described the moment as “absolute terror”. He expects the damage to her mind to take years to heal. She has tried to go back to school once and left early. She dreams of her classmate bleeding. “A student needs stability to be able to learn,” her father said. “But we have no stability, and there are no alternatives.”
After the shooting, absences rose. The principal, Naima Aloush, said artillery, quadcopter and sniper fire still reach the school regularly: “it comes down like rain.” She added: “Every day, I come to school with my hand over my heart.” The education ministry’s account that day, reported by Anadolu-sourced A News, said Israeli military vehicles had opened fire on the Muradiya Girls’ School and the area around it, and that six students had been killed in Israeli attacks over the previous two days.
The arithmetic of a school week
The school year reopened on September 19, after almost three years in which war had broken it apart. Within weeks the Palestinian Ministry of Education was counting again. Between October 18 and 24, it said, ten students and one teacher were killed; the children were between six and sixteen years old. Among them, according to the ministry, was an eight-year-old girl from east of Deir el-Balah, the only survivor of a family wiped out when their home was bombed in late 2023, who died of wounds from Israeli fire days earlier. On a Sunday, five students were wounded, some critically, when the Islamic University campus in Gaza City was attacked, part of the same two strikes on a university already in ruins.
The ministry has asked for urgent international protection for pupils and schools. On October 20, after five schoolchildren died, it went further and called on the UN, UNICEF and other organisations to stop at nothing short of real steps, beyond monitoring and statements of concern.
The larger ledger is older and heavier. According to the ministry’s figures, more than 20,000 Palestinian students and education workers were killed in the three years of war. The education minister, Amjad Barham, has said that more than 90% of Gaza’s schools have been destroyed. Children who were already learning in tents, and some who cannot hear or see the lesson at all, now also have to survive the walk.
A line that moves
The ceasefire was agreed in October 2025. Since then, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, Israel has killed at least 1,574 Palestinians and wounded 5,687. The UN says the Yellow Line has crept westward, so that Israel now controls more than 65% of the Strip rather than the 53% that was agreed. At least 66 children have been killed near it.
One might reflect that a truce is a map drawn by men far away, and that maps of this kind have a habit of moving while the people living on them stay where they are. The tents of Muradiya did not move. The line came closer to them.
In Deir el-Balah, Abdullah Hamad, the brother who lived, is afraid now to go to school by himself. He is also afraid, his father says, that he will lose him too.