Reuters Videos
STORY: All 12 of Gaza's higher education institutions have been destroyed or damaged in seven months of war.And more than 350 teachers and academics have been killed, according to Palestinian official data.Gazans fear Israel's military offensive has inflicted damage to their education system that will long outlast the fighting.Israa Azoum is one of 90,000 Gazan students left stranded, but she's doing what she can to keep learning. The fourth-year medical student volunteers at Al Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah to help stretched staff deal with waves of patients."I used to worry about my exams, how to understand this subject but now our worries are much greater. We are worried about how would we study, how would we even learn medicine."She studied here - at Gaza City's now destroyed Al Azhar University."I come to hospital everyday at 8am to 8 or 7pm. I never feel tired because that is what I love doing. I love medicine, I love working as a doctor and I don't want to forget what I have learned."Gaza and the occupied West Bank have internationally high literacy levels.But Israel's blockade and repeated rounds of conflict left education fragile and under-resourced.Fahid Al-Hadad, head of Al Aqsa's emergency department, also lectures in medicine at the Islamic University of Gaza, now reduced to rubble."My home was destroyed in this war and even my references and books, it was all destroyed and lost. This was for 10 years or 12 years of medical experience. All of them was lost in one second."Hadad and others say online teaching may help in the interim, but it would need international support, not to mention good internet."So we can rebuild this again, for teaching. Inside Gaza, through online or through anywhere else that we can give it. In a tent even, we are ready, we are ready to give anywhere but much better inside Gaza than outside because don't forget that we are doctors and we are working as medical doctors."In a tent near Khan Younis, pupils take classes on the sand.Schools have also been bombed or turned into shelters for displaced people, leaving about 625,000 school-aged children unable to attend classes.Asmaa al-Astal is a volunteer teacher.“We opened this school because we could see that our children and our friends' children and others were unable to go back to learning – whether they be younger or older – and they used to be advanced students who did well in school. So we opened up this school on a volunteer basis, with private efforts from our brethren in Egypt. Today we are receiving students and we have a very large number of them still waiting, we are unable to cater to all of them."The U.N. estimates that more than 70% of schools in Gaza will need full reconstruction or major rehabilitation after the war.
Yahoo Finance 
