Gaza students returned to in-person schooling last week for the first time in nearly three years. This could be a moment of promise - or one of more of the same.
The promise would come if the schools - instead of indoctrinating children to hate Jews and Israel, as Israel and educational monitoring organizations have long alleged and documented - taught reading, writing and arithmetic while instilling tolerance rather than glorifying violence.
The more-of-the-same moment would come if the school venues changed, but the curriculum did not.
Reuters ran a story on Monday under the headline, “Gaza students return to in-person schooling for the first time in three years.”
The story was entirely predictable, describing the lack of functioning school buildings, the need to study in makeshift tents, and how many families could not afford school uniforms, notebooks, and pens. It also told the stories of children trying to resume their studies amid displacement and fear.
Gaza death toll numbers unverified, produced by Hamas-affiliated groups
All of that is worth covering, as is the return of hundreds of thousands of children to some form of organized education. But it is only part of the story.
Reuters cited UNICEF as saying that 98% of Gaza’s schools were either destroyed or damaged during the war. It also reported that some 22,000 students and more than 770 education workers, including 532 teachers, had been killed, attributing those figures to Ibrahim Ramadan, the education director for East Khan Yunis.
But it did not explain that Ramadan is an official in Gaza’s existing Hamas-era education bureaucracy, how the figures were compiled or independently verified, and whether any of the education workers were also members of Hamas or other terrorist organizations.
The article also cited a Palestinian death toll of more than 73,000 without estimating how many were Hamas combatants or identifying which “Palestinian authorities” supplied the figure - likely the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.
An average reader could therefore walk away from the story feeling a great deal of sympathy for the Palestinian students - understandably - and anger at Israel for destroying schools and killing students. But that reader would be given little context for why so many schools were struck or damaged, how many were used for military purposes, or how deeply Hamas embedded itself in Gaza’s civilian infrastructure.
Only in the final sentence did the article mention that Israel “has repeatedly accused Hamas of using schools for military purposes.” That point was immediately followed in the same sentence, in perfect he-says/she-says fashion, by the words “which Hamas denies.”
The result is a familiar picture: weak, victimized Palestinians on one side and a powerful Israel on the other seemingly destroying Gaza’s schools in a vacuum.
But even that is not the most troubling omission.
What is being taught in these schools?
The most troubling omission is the article’s complete silence about what is being taught in these reopened schools, who is doing the teaching, and who is deciding what goes into the curriculum.
That is the real story.
For Gaza to have any chance of a different future - for the hundreds of thousands of children returning to school to have a better future than the one Hamas has condemned them to - it is not enough merely to reopen classrooms.
Rebuilding the same educational system, using the same textbooks, employing the same teachers without proper vetting, and transmitting the same messages would not change anything. Rather, it would rebuild the ideological foundations for the next October 7.
As one senior US official, invoking a line commonly attributed to Lenin, put it at the recent Middle East America Dialogue (MEAD) conference in Washington: “Give me a child for eight years, and I’ll give you the future forever.”
Whether Lenin actually said those precise words is less important than the truth behind them: Whoever educates the children shapes the future.
For Gaza ever to have a chance, it must free itself from an educational culture that demonizes Jews, denies Israel’s legitimacy and presents violence and “martyrdom” as heroic. The path to changing that culture runs through schools.
A senior Israeli participant at the MEAD conference called the deradicalization of Gaza the “most important thing” in US President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan. He argued that Gaza’s physical rehabilitation must be directly linked to its ideological rehabilitation.
“If we don’t do this, the process will fail,” he said.
“That’s how you win the peace: You deradicalize Gaza, and you do what hasn’t been done for 30 years in the education system and in the mosques,” he added, stressing that this would take a generation, not merely a year, two years or three.
That is the challenge.
Gaza needs terror-free schools that teach tolerance. It needs textbooks that do not erase Israel, teachers who are not affiliated with terrorist organizations, and classrooms where children are taught how to build a future rather than sacrifice themselves trying to destroy someone else’s.
None of that appeared in the Reuters article, even though it’s an important part of any story about Gazans’ first day back at school.
The important question is not only whether Gaza’s children are back at desks in schools - makeshift or otherwise - but what they will be taught while sitting at those desks. That is also a critical test of the much-discussed “day after.”
Hamas can lose its tunnels, rockets and weapons yet retain enormous influence if it continues to educate the next generation according to the worldview that produced October 7.
Trump’s 20-point plan declares that Gaza must become a “deradicalized, terror-free zone” that poses no threat to its neighbors. Yet the plan does not spell out in any detail who will rewrite or approve textbooks, who will vet teachers, who will monitor classrooms, or what standards will be used to determine whether incitement has actually been removed.
Reuters reported that Gaza’s Education Ministry, backed by international and local organizations, was moving ahead with the 2026-2027 school year. It said at least 540,000 students were expected to attend makeshift private schools, temporary learning centers and other educational points with UNICEF support.
But providing tents, supplies and educational support is not the same as controlling the curriculum.
UNICEF has not replaced Gaza’s Education Ministry. UNESCO has not assumed control of the school system. And Gaza’s proposed technocratic administration - still operating from Cairo rather than inside Gaza - does not appear to have taken responsibility for determining what children are being taught.
In other words, Gaza’s children are returning to a school system that, as far as can be seen publicly, has not undergone any fundamental ideological transformation since October 7.
There is no publicly visible, independently enforced program to ensure that incitement, antisemitism and the glorification of terrorism have been removed from the textbooks; no transparent mechanism for vetting teachers; and no outside body regularly monitoring what is taught inside the classrooms.
Until there is, reopening Gaza’s schools may return its children to classrooms, but it will not give them - or Gaza - a different future.