Real Lives
Ghadeer Odeh built a school in Gaza City out of two tents
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Israel's assault drove Ghadeer Odeh's family out of their home in Gaza City soon after October 2023, and they moved thirteen times before the shooting stopped. Thirteen addresses, each chosen because the last one had become impossible.
When the ceasefire came in October 2025 she went back to Gaza City. A month later she opened a school.
Two hundred children, four to seventeen#
Al-Karama sits in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood in the north of the city. Two hundred boys and girls attend it, from four-year-olds to seventeen-year-olds, and the lessons happen on the ground — inside one of two tents, or in the open air when the tents are full.
There are no desks. There is no blackboard. Most children arrive without a notebook.
Odeh, who directs the school, told the American outlet Drop Site News that she founded it to confront the ignorance that has come to threaten a new generation of Palestinians in Gaza. That is the whole design brief, and everything about the place follows from it.
What a school is, reduced to its parts#
Strip away the building, the furniture, the stationery and the timetable, and what remains is a person who knows something standing in front of children who do not, for long enough and often enough that the knowing transfers.
Odeh had been displaced thirteen times when she worked out that this was still available to her. It cost two tents and a plot of ground in a neighbourhood that had been shelled.
The arithmetic underneath it is unforgiving. A child who was six in October 2023 is nine now, and has spent the years in which reading is normally learned somewhere other than a classroom. A seventeen-year-old in Odeh's open-air lessons has lost the last two years of secondary school. Neither gap closes on its own, and neither closes at the speed at which a ministry can rebuild a school.
What closes it, for two hundred children in Sheikh Radwan, is a woman who came back and started teaching before anyone gave her a room.
Not the only one#
She is one of many. Gaza's teachers have been reassembling their profession in tents, shelters and stairwells since long before the ceasefire, and this paper reported last week on the women running the Strip's tent classrooms through a third year of it.
The distinction of Al-Karama is that it exists as an institution — a name, a director, an age range, a roll of two hundred — rather than as an improvised class that dissolves when its teacher moves on.
Ghadeer Odeh moved thirteen times. Then she built the thing that does not move.
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