by Saud Abu Ramadan
GAZA, Aug. 8 (Xinhua) -- On Saturday, tens of thousands of children returned to schools in the besieged Gaza Strip following a five-month closure of educational institutions due to the outbreak of coronavirus in the Palestinian territories.
All the schools run by Hamas government's Ministry of Education, private schools, and schools run by the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA), reopened on Saturday morning with instructions of taking all the precautionary measures against the pandemic.
The Ministry of Education and the UNRWA announced starting the new academic year 2020-2021 one month ahead of the annual schedule to catch up the period which was interrupted by the outbreak of COVID-19 in March.
According to the ministry and the UNRWA, all the schools in the Gaza Strip were sterilized in the past couple of days.
The school hour was reduced to five instead of seven, said the Ministry of Education officials. The students would study the remedial curriculum that have not been completed through last year, said the officials, adding that everyone should wear facemask and gloves.
Farid Abu Azra, head of UNRWA Education Program in Gaza, told Xinhua that "we have a series of programs that aim at presenting psychological support to the students who have been negatively affected by staying at home for a long period."
"Besides, we will teach the students in our schools how to deal with the new virus by urging them to follow health and preventive precautionary instructions and adopt these measures to be as part of the children's daily routine," according to Abu Azra.
He explained that UNRWA schools would manage to integrate traditional education with distance learning, to reduce the number of hours students stay at schools.
UNRWA said that it had received 285,768 Palestine refugee students in 277 schools, including 32,083 in the first grade of primary school.
Meanwhile, Ayman al-Yazoory, a senior official in the Hamas-run Ministry of Education, told Xinhua that "there are 402 governmental schools and 265,000 schoolchildren in the Gaza Strip."
UNRWA said in an official statement that the afternoon shift would start an hour and a half after the end of the morning period, to sterilize schools between the two periods.
The statement also said that it decided to cancel the canteens (cafeterias) in the current period, calling on students to bring their own food and water bottles from their homes.
Ziad Thabet, undersecretary of the Ministry of Education in the Gaza Strip, told Xinhua that during August, schoolchildren would receive remedial materials, while the number of classes per school day would be 4 classes only.
He explained that the ministry had prepared multiple scenarios to deal with the school year, including different stages.
On March 22, the Hamas-run Gaza government, declared a state of emergency, imposing a series of precautionary restrictions. All schools, universities, mosques, and restaurants have been shut down, and public gatherings have been prohibited, especially in the marketplaces.
The densely populated Gaza Strip, home of more than two million Palestinians, didn't record any COVID-19 infections among the populations in the cities, towns, and refugee camps.
However, since March 5, the Hamas-run ministry of health in Gaza recorded 78 infections of Palestinians, citizens of the Gaza Strip that traveled abroad and returned to Gaza through Rafah crossing point with Egypt or Erez Crossing point with Israel.
Besides the Israeli blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip for more than 13 years, Hamas authorities, which have been ruling the coastal enclave since 2007, is strictly dealing with preventing the pandemic in the territory.
Hamas controls the two main crossing points either between Gaza and Egypt or between Gaza and Israel, and any Gaza citizen who comes from abroad through the two crossing points is immediately taken to quarantine outside the densely populated areas. Enditem
