by Sanaa Kamal
GAZA, Jun 1 (NNN-XINHUA) – Poverty forced Ahmed al-Aghbar, a 13-year-old refugee child, in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza, to drop out of school, to help keep his family afloat.
“When I see students going to school, I feel very sad,” al-Aghbar told Xinhua, adding that, he used to dream of becoming a teacher when he grows up.
“My father can hardly bring food back home … I feel that I am old enough to take family responsibilities,” the boy said.
For Al-Aghbar, failing to afford a new uniform and being bullied for no pocket money at school was the last straw. After quitting school, he started helping his father with fishing off the Gaza coast.
“We are deprived of education because of poverty, war and the curtailment of the UNRWA,” he added, referring to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, a lifeline for Palestinian refugees in their own land, in Gaza.
The 13-member al-Aghbar family’s situation was not that bad 16 years ago, when Israel permanently imposed a land, air and sea blockade on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, forcing them to live on the aid provided by the UN relief agency.
“My son cannot provide the minimum amount of food, because the Israelis forbid him from fishing in the sea for long distances. The Israelis even prevent Palestinian fishermen from fishing in times of crisis,” said al-Aghbar’s grandmother, Umm Ayman al-Aghbar.
What’s worse, UNRWA has significantly reduced its services year by year, leading to a shortage of food and educational supplies, while Israel often launches attacks against Gaza, the 67-year-old woman said.
UNRWA has been stuck in a financial crisis for years. After the U.S. stopped its financial support to the aid agency in 2018, it was almost unable to continue its vital services for some 5.7 million Palestinian refugees.
UNRWA Commissioner-General, Philippe Lazzarini, warned in late 2021, that the agency was in the “danger zone” and faced potential collapse.
Many UNRWA-sponsored schools in Gaza have stopped providing educational supplies to the students, such as notebooks, pens and even meals, and poor nutrition and psychological conditions started to appear, Dirdah al-Shaer, a Gaza-based psychologist, told Xinhua.
“The unprecedented new reality imposes a new financial burden on the families, which are already suffering from extreme poverty due to the Israeli blockade,” said al-Shaer.
That is why a lot of students hate going to school and prefer to work for meager pay, just to help their families, as “schools have become more of a burden than an institution that seeks to educate, develop and prepare them to be builders of the future,” he said.
Youssef al-Ghoul, 14, dropped out of school two months ago to work at a local market as a porter, so as to help his eight-member family financially, after his father’s grocery store was hit by Israeli airstrikes.
“We lost our only source of livelihood,” al-Ghoul said, adding that, his father, later diagnosed with blood cancer, could not work anymore, so the family can hardly keep going financially.
Thus al-Ghoul and his three brothers decided to quit school and find jobs with meager pay, in order to support the whole family.
Usually they earn about four U.S. dollars a day per person, which is “barely enough for us to pay the rent and provide the minimum food needed for our family,” al-Ghoul said.– NNN-XINHUA
