Field Reports
Palestine opens its school year on 6 September and delays Gaza's
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The school year 2026/27 begins on Sunday 6 September in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and thirteen days later in Gaza, under a calendar the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education has now published in full.
Teachers and administrative staff report on Tuesday 1 September in the West Bank. In Gaza the ministry has set Wednesday 16 September for staff and Saturday 19 September for pupils, and has explained the gap by the logistics of reopening there and by the heat.
The split calendar is itself the year's first piece of information about the state of Palestinian education. One system, two starting lines, thirteen days apart.
What the Gaza date has to hold#
Gaza enters the year with almost no intact school buildings. UNICEF's 2026 appeal for the State of Palestine records that 97.5 per cent of schools have been damaged or destroyed and that at least 92 per cent will need full reconstruction or major rehabilitation before they can function.
The agency puts more than 637,000 children out of school and says around sixty per cent of school-age children still have no access to in-person learning. Most teaching that does happen, it says, has to happen in tents.
UNICEF supports some 135,400 children at more than a hundred multi-service learning spaces across the Strip, and its Back to Learning programme aims to return 336,000 children to classrooms by the end of this year and all of Gaza's school-age children to in-person learning during 2027.
A first grade that has never sat in a classroom#
The cohort the calendar exposes most clearly is the youngest. Children who should have started first grade in the war years reach 6 September having never been enrolled in a school building.
Their teachers will be working through a curriculum designed for a system with laboratories, libraries and playgrounds, in learning spaces that have canvas walls and a shared water tank.
In the West Bank the obstacle is different and no less material. Checkpoints, settler road closures and the withheld clearance revenues that pay public-sector salaries all fall between a child in a village and the school bus, and the ministry's own budget position has not improved this summer.
For the cohort at the far end of the system the calendar matters differently. Students finishing school this year face an application season abroad, and this paper's standing guide to scholarships for Palestinian students — pinned on the front page and kept current — is written for exactly that autumn.
Two dates, then, and one instruction underneath both of them: the year opens. In a system in which every reason to postpone is available and documented, the ministry has published a calendar and asked families to keep to it.
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