[Source: Reuters]

The new school year in the Palestinian territories officially began on Monday, with all schools in Gaza shut after 11 months of war and no sign of a ceasefire.

As fighting continued, Israel announced new orders to residents of the north Gaza Strip to leave their homes, in response to rockets fired into Israel.

Umm Zaki’s son Moataz, 15, was supposed to begin 10th grade. Instead, he woke up in their tent in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza and was sent to fetch a container of water from more than a kilometre away.

The Palestinian Education Ministry said all Gaza schools were shut and 90% of them had been destroyed or damaged in Israel’s assault on the territory, launched after Hamas gunmen attacked Israeli towns in October last year.

The U.N. Palestinian aid agency UNRWA, which runs around half of Gaza’s schools, has turned as many of them as it can into emergency shelters housing thousands of displaced families.

“The longer the children stay out of school the more difficult it is for them to catch up on their lost learning and the more prone they are to becoming a lost generation, falling prey to exploitation including child marriage, child labour, and recruitment into armed groups,” UNRWA Director of Communications Juliette Touma told Reuters.

The education ministry said that in addition to the 625,000 Gazans already registered for school who would be missing classes, another 58,000 six-year-olds should have registered to start first grade this year.

Last month, UNRWA launched a back-to-learning programme in 45 of its shelters. Teachers set up games, drama, arts, music, and sports activities to help children with their mental health.

Nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been forced from their homes at least once, and some have had to flee as many as 10 times.

In the latest evacuation order, Israel told residents of an area in the northern Gaza Strip they must leave their homes, following the firing of rockets into southern Israel the previous day.

The United Nations urged Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip to attend medical facilities to get children under the age of 10 years old vaccinated against polio. Limited pauses in fighting have been held to allow the vaccination campaign, which aims to reach 640,000 children in Gaza after the territory’s first polio case in around 25 years.

U.N. officials said the campaign in the southern and central Gaza Strip had so far reached more than half of the children there needing the drops. A second round of vaccination will be required four weeks after the first.

Later on Monday, Touma said 450,000 of the children targeted with the campaign were vaccinated.

Health officials said on Monday two separate Israeli airstrikes had killed seven people in central Gaza, while another strike killed one man in Khan Younis further south.

The armed wings of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad said they fought against Israeli forces in several areas across the Gaza Strip with anti-tank rockets and mortar fire.

The Israeli military said forces continued to dismantle military infrastructure and killed dozens of militants in the past days, including senior Hamas and Islamic Jihad commanders.

The war was triggered on Oct. 7 when the Hamas group that ran Gaza attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza has killed more than 40,900 Palestinians, according to the enclave’s health ministry.

The two warring sides each blame the other for the failure so far to reach a ceasefire that would end the fighting and see the release of hostages.