This is how Israel fights education in Jenin and prevents thousands of students from reaching their schools

More than 40 days have passed since the start of the second semester in the West Bank. While the Ministry of Education in Gaza is trying to save the academic year, students of the occupied West Bank camps are deprived of their schools due to the Israeli military operations “the iron fence” that started in late January in the Jenin camp, and from it it expanded to affect the Tulkarm and Tubas camps.

To the town of Burqin, west of Jenin, where its relatives were home, the Ashwaq Muhammad family, a tenth -grade student, was displaced from Jenin camp. In the town, which has been received since the start of the “Iron Wall” about 5,000 displaced people from Jenin camp, Ashwaq was able to join the government town school, after a decision from the Directorate of Education in Jenin, allowing the displaced students to attend school classes in the places that received them.

Ashwaq says that her luck is good because she was able to overcome the first weeks of storming and not working in school, which helped her in compensation and follow up on all the academic subjects.

Complete paralysis

A longing that does not apply to thousands of students registered in the UNRWA schools in the camp, which numbered 1700 students, whose schools have closed their doors since the end of last December, after the crisis between the Palestinian security services and the resistance inside Jenin camp.

Students – distributed in 4 UNRWA schools inside the camp – faced difficulty in ordering the study for about a month, and UNRWA announced at the time of Roland Friedic, its West Bank director, that “education in Jenin camp is the most affected by these events.”
“The Jenin camp lives a vicious circle of violence, which makes it uninterrupted at all, and schools have been closed and the educational process has been disrupted, which threatens the future of students in the region,” Fredic added.

With the entry of the second semester, Israel forced the people to displace their homes in the camp, and promoted its military presence in the city of Jenin and its various neighborhoods, imposed a state of security instability and fear among people, destroyed the infrastructure, and was re -drawn the camp map, which caused the vital sectors in the city, especially education with almost complete paralysis.

The second semester was not opened in all the city’s schools, especially the camp schools, which cleared its residents and turned into a mass of destruction and knee.

In the “Al -Kafif Association” in the city of Jenin, where Citizen Salsabil, her family and a number of her relatives, she says that they have 5 children within the basic stage have been forbidden since their displacement from the camp on the third day of the Israeli storming.

Salsabil adds that school attempts to compensate through electronic classes “feasible” because the displaced do not have computer devices.

Israeli scheme

On his other hand, the governor of Jenin Kamal Abu Al -Rab says that – according to the latest statistics of the Jenin Education Directorate – about 15,000 students cannot reach the city and the camp schools, not to mention about 6 thousand university students from “Palestine 48” enrolled in the American Arab League in Jenin, due to the occupation prohibiting their passage through the Al -Jalmah checkpoint to the city.

Abu Al -Rab adds to Al -Jazeera Net that education is the most sensitive sectors of the future of the Palestinians in general and the fetus in particular, and that Israel, through its aggression, seeks to strike and restrict this sector, and to deliver a message to the citizen that he is “deprived” of his most basic rights guaranteed by all international conventions.

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“This is an Israeli plan to find the lives of citizens here, and to convince them that they have no future, nor for their children,” the Palestinian official continues.

He stated that in the previous intrusions, the occupation insisted, and many times, to storm the city and the camp for school hours, and besieged students inside their schools, and for long hours, “We were trying to coordinate to get students out of their schools, with the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the Palestinian link.”

The matter was not limited to detention inside schools – according to the governor – but the occupation soldiers fired tear gas at many schools, and stormed them, as happened in the Kabatiya Elementary School south of Jenin, and fired live bullets towards other schools while students were in them, and they dried the streets leading to some schools, as happened in the eastern neighborhood of Jenin.

During the “Iron Wall” operation, Israel has killed 3 students so far in Jenin Governorate alone, the last of which is Ismail Abu Ghali (17 years old), a student at the secondary stage, after besieging a house in the eastern neighborhood of the city.

Return attempts

Sadiq al -Khaddour, a spokesman for the Ministry of Education in Palestine, said in a press statement that there is an increase in the rate of “educational losses” in a worrying way in a number of schools in the northern West Bank, and that the educational process lost 15 educational days in the first semester due to the violations of the occupation.

Al -Khaddour explained that about 90 schools from the schools of Tulkarm and Jenin have shifted working hours in the electronic system (remotely), pointing out that the ministry was planning to invest a holiday between the two semesters in favor of compensation for students, “but the occupation aggression disrupted the compensation plan.”

The “educational losses” – according to Al -Khadour – is not limited to what students miss from classes, but there are psychological repercussions that fall on students and teachers that cannot be neglected, and educational materials that are difficult to accomplish, especially among students of the basic classes, and that the repeated disruption of the work loses students a large part of the learning material that must be accomplished.

Al -Khaddour stressed that resorting to electronic education in some schools during the current circumstances is “unjust”, but it is “the only option currently available and there is no alternative to it.”

According to sources for Al -Jazeera Net, there are differences in the Palestinian government about the return of the face -to -students to students in Jenin, as the Ministry of Education is trying to issue a statement of the return of the study during the next week, according to an emergency program and by 3 days per week, while the governor opposes for fear of the safety of students, especially in light of the continuous incursions.