Field Reports
Jerusalem's Christian schools shut classrooms after Israel denied teachers permits
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Dozens of private schools in occupied East Jerusalem did not open for the new school year on Tuesday. Their pupils — about 15,000 of them, on figures kept by the Israeli monitoring group Ir Amim — were sent home, and the schools said the strike continues until further notice.
The cause is a stack of paper. Most of the striking schools are Christian institutions run by the churches, and their General Secretariat said Israel had not renewed entry permits for more than seventy teachers, administrators and support staff who live in the occupied West Bank and travel into Jerusalem to work. Without the permits, the staff cannot legally reach their own classrooms.
The schools involved are among the oldest continuously operating institutions in the city, and their teaching staff has always been drawn from both sides of a line that Palestinians did not draw. What is new is the permit regime around it.
Three years of narrowing#
Restrictions on West Bank residents entering Jerusalem tightened sharply after October 2023 and have not been lifted since. Reporting in the Israeli and Palestinian press across those three years has recorded mounting difficulty for West Bank teachers trying to reach work in the city, inside a sweeping slowdown in issuing and renewing entry permits for West Bank residents generally.
A separate Israeli measure, in force since February 2026, bars holders of degrees from Palestinian Authority institutions from teaching posts — a rule that strikes at the qualification route most Palestinian teachers in the city took.
The wider school year#
The strike lands inside a year already assembled from gaps. The Palestinian education ministry opened the West Bank and Jerusalem year for staff on 1 September and for pupils on 6 September, with Gaza's staff returning on 16 September and its pupils on 19 September.
UNICEF's 2026 appeal for the State of Palestine records 97.5 per cent of Gaza's schools damaged or destroyed and more than 637,000 children out of school there. In Jerusalem the classrooms are standing. On Tuesday morning the teachers were on the far side of a checkpoint.
