Airstrikes are frequent, drones buzz constantly overhead and an Israeli ground invasion looms large. But on a small patch of sandy wasteland on the outskirts of Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, a group of teachers has set up classrooms in tents, determined to continue educating as war rages around them.
“This magnificent scene sends a message to the world: We are a nation that loves to learn and loves education, that rejects ignorance,” Nehad Badria, the principal, said in an address to students as they lined up outside the tents on Tuesday.
The students, all girls between the ages of 6 and 15, listened intently before Badria led them in call-and-response chants. “We love to learn,” they shouted, pumping their fists in the air as they were filmed by an NBC News cameraman. “We are free, Arab Palestine.”
Set up to serve some of the tens of thousands of children displaced by the fighting in Gaza, the school is named Al Awdah, which means “return” in Arabic, a nod to the hope that students and teachers can one day return to their homes in other parts of the enclave.
Badria said he’d been forced to leave his home in northern Gaza for Rafah, which had a population of around 250,000 before Israeli troops drove many of the strip’s residents south, swelling the city’s numbers to more than 1 million.
Israel began its counteroffensive in Gaza after Hamas launched mutlipronged attacks on Israel that left 1,200 dead and saw over 240 people taken hostage. Israel’s military has regularly bombarded Rafah from the air as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to launch a full-scale ground invasion of the city, he says to ensure the elimination of Hamas, despite repeated calls from the U.S. and other allies for restraint.
The Israeli army on Monday ordered tens of thousands of people to start evacuating from the city, signaling that the ground invasion there could be imminent. Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an army spokesman, said 100,000 people were being ordered to move to a nearby Israel-declared humanitarian zone called Muwasi.
Meanwhile, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said last month that 80% of schools in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed since the war began, and an NBC News investigation found last month that Israeli forces have destroyed or damaged at least five of the strip’s seven major universities.
Last month, more than 20 experts from OCHA questioned whether Israel has targeted educational infrastructure deliberately — a strategy they call “scholasticide.” Israel denies accusations that it deliberately targets civilian buildings and has accused Hamas fighters of using them as cover — a charge the militant group denies.
“We saw our students playing between the tents amid the waste and stagnant water, which aggravated the humanitarian, health and environmental disaster,” Badria said, adding: “We said we must return the students to normality and study after being deprived of education for more than seven months.”
The school was overwhelmed with applicants, he said. To cope with demand, the headmaster explained, he and his nine fellow teachers ration lessons for the 600 pupils selected to study there to three days a week for girls and three days for boys, all between ages 6 and 15.
After the students file in through the wire fence surrounding the school, a piece of paper stuck on the entrance of each tent indicates the grade being taught.
Addressing her ninth grade class in English on Tuesday, volunteer teacher Diana Sabouh, 36, asked her class of 24 students to tell her “the beautiful places in Gaza.”
“Al Omari mosque,” one girl replied, referring to Gaza’s oldest mosque, which Palestinian officials say was leveled by an Israeli airstrike. NBC News has verified video of the destruction.
In another class, the sentence “War is cruel” was written on a whiteboard to illustrate a point of Arabic grammar.
Outside, a group of envious boys pressed their faces against the school’s gate, waiting for their turn in class.
Before the war began, UNICEF reported more than 500,000 children already needed mental health and psychosocial support in the Gaza Strip. In February it estimated the number had risen to more than a million.
And at Al Awdah the toll the war has taken on some of the pupils was clear.
Lian Shamaly, 14, said her family had moved several times after leaving their home in Gaza City in the north of the enclave before they ended up in Rafah.
“I heard my teachers were martyred,” she said, adding matter-of-factly that many of her friends had been killed. “No one left, just three or four girls.”
Almost 36,000 people have been killed since Oct. 7, according to health officials in the enclave, although many more bodies are believed to be below the rubble of Gaza’s destroyed buildings.
As Netanyahu struggles to keep afloat his coalition, the most right-wing government in the country’s history, some members of his Cabinet have insisted Israel should focus on attacking Rafah, despite warnings from the United Nations and multiple aid agencies that an incursion would have catastrophic consequences.
As Secretary of State Antony Blinken renewed efforts to broker a cease-fire with Hamas last week, the Israeli leader said he would order his forces into the city even if some of the remaining Israeli hostages were released. “We will enter Rafah and we will eliminate the Hamas battalions there — with or without a deal, in order to achieve total victory,” he said.
The Israeli military has also released video of dozens of Israeli tanks and armored vehicles a short drive away from Al Awdah, across the border in southern Israel.
For Shamaly’s classmate Malak Qanoa, 13, the scale of war had already hit home. She said three of her friends and some of her teachers at the school near her home in Gaza City had been killed.
“We’re going to get such a shock finding out who’s dead and who’s alive,” she said.
