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SvennoJ on 24 October 2025
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Gaza risks ‘lost generation’ due to ruined schools: UN official

With Gaza’s education system shattered by two years of gruelling war, UNICEF’s regional director says he fears for a “lost generation” of children wandering ruined streets with nothing to do.

“This is the third year that there has been no school,” Edouard Beigbeder, the UN agency’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, told the AFP news agency in Jerusalem after returning from the Palestinian territory.

“If we don’t start a real transition for all children in February, we will enter a fourth year. And then we can talk about a lost generation.”

A US-brokered ceasefire, which came into effect earlier in October, has allowed UNICEF and other education partners to get about one-sixth of children who should be in school into temporary “learning centres”, Beigbeder told AFP.

“They have three days of learning in reading, mathematics and writing, but this is far from a formal education as we know it,” he added.

Beigbeder said that such learning centres, often located in schools or near displacement camps, consisted of metal structures covered with plastic sheeting or of tents. He said there were sometimes chairs, cardboard boxes or wooden planks serving as tables, and that children would write on salvaged slates or plastic boards.


We need the ceasefire to hold’: UNICEF

Edouard Beigbeder, the Middle East and North Africa director at UNICEF, has run through a long list of healthcare and other services needed by Palestinian children in Gaza after two years of deadly Israeli bombardment.

“We need to double the numbers of incubators running in Gaza,” he said in a video shared on X. “We need water and sanitation systems running, providing safe water for children. We need to reopen the schools and we need to have places where children can have psychosocial support.”


UNRWA chief says Gaza war showed ‘utter disregard for international law’

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA, marked United Nations Day today by stressing the need to recommit to strengthening the “rule-based” order.

In a post on X, Lazzarini said the UN has for 80 years “spared no efforts to forge peace, tackle poverty & hunger, advance human rights & strengthen a rule-based world”.

“Recommitting to these principles matters more than ever amid the catastrophe in Gaza, where we have seen an utter disregard for international humanitarian law, including the weaponisation of aid,” he said.