School materials enter Gaza after being blocked for two years

GENEVA, Jan 27 (Reuters) - The U.N. children’s agency said on Tuesday it had for the first time in two-and-a-half years been able to deliver school kits with learning materials into Gaza after they were previously blocked by Israeli authorities.

Thousands of kits, including pencils, exercise books and wooden cubes to play with, have now entered the enclave, UNICEF said.

"We have now, in the last days, got in thousands of recreational kits, hundreds of school-in-a-carton kits. We're looking at getting 2,500 more school kits in, in the next week, because they've been approved," UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said.

A spokesperson for COGAT, the arm of the Israeli military that oversees aid flows into the Gaza Strip, confirmed it had recently allowed UNICEF to bring in learning kits though not text books. A COGAT spokesperson told Reuters learning kits had been let in several times during the war, without saying how.

UNICEF is scaling up its education to support half of children of school age - around 336,000 - with learning support. Teaching will mainly happen in tents, Elder said, due to widespread devastation of school buildings in the enclave during the war which was triggered by Hamas' assault on Israel on October 2023.

School materials enter Gaza after being blocked for two years, UN agency says

At least 97% of schools sustained some level of damage, according to the most recent satellite assessment by the U.N. in July.