Gaza risks ‘lost generation’ due to ruined schools: UN official

With Gaza’s education system shattered by two years of gruelling war, UNICEF’s regional director says he fears for a “lost generation” of children wandering ruined streets with nothing to do.

“This is the third year that there has been no school,” Edouard Beigbeder, the UN agency’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, told AFP in Jerusalem on Thursday after returning from the Palestinian territory.

“If we don’t start a real transition for all children in February, we will enter a fourth year. And then we can talk about a lost generation.”

The devastating conflict between Israel and Hamas reduced swathes of Gaza to rubble, displaced the vast majority of its population at least once and crippled public services.

The destruction “is almost omnipresent wherever you go,”