VOA · Education
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The Education beat reports on schools, universities, and learning trends worldwide. Expect academic vocabulary in a news format — a good bridge between everyday English and the lecture-style audio used in exams like IELTS Section 4.
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01The new school year in the Palestinian territories officially began on Monday, but all schools in Gaza are closed after 11 months of war.
02There is no sign of a ceasefire.
03Israel gave new orders to people in the northern Gaza Strip to leave their homes.
04The order came after rockets were fired into Israel from Gaza.
05Amzaki has a son, Moataz, who is 15 years old.
06He was supposed to begin 10th grade.
07Instead, he woke up in the family's tent in Deer al-Bala in central Gaza.
08Water is more than one kilometer away from the tent.
09The mother of five told Reuters by text message, Usually, such a day would be a day of celebration, seeing the children in the new uniform, going to school, and dreaming of becoming doctors and engineers.
10Today, all we hope is that the war ends before we lose any of them.
11The Palestinian Education Ministry said all Gaza schools were closed, and 90% of them had been destroyed or damaged in the war.
12The war started after Hamas gunmen attacked Israeli towns on October 7th, killing about 1,200 people.
13The UN-Palestinian Aid Agency, UNRWA, operates about half of Gaza's schools.
14Many of them are now emergency shelters, housing thousands of displaced families.
15UNRWA Director of Communications, Julia Tuma, told Reuters, The longer the children stay out of school, the more difficult it is for them to catch up on their lost learning.
16She added that they are then more likely to become a lost generation.
17They are at risk for the dangers of child marriage, child labor, and recruitment into armed groups.
18The Education Ministry said there are already 625,000 Gazans registered for school who would be missing classes.
19Another 58,000 6-year-olds should have registered to start first grade this year.
20Last month, the UNRWA started a back-to-learning program in 45 of its shelters.
21Teachers set up games, drama, arts, music, and sports activities to help with children's mental health.
22Nearly all of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been forced from their homes at least once.
23Some have had to flee 10 times.
24In the latest evacuation order, Israel told residents of an area in the northern Gaza Strip that they must leave their homes.
25Rockets had been fired from there into southern Israel the day before.
26The United Nations urged Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip to attend medical centers to get children under the age of 10 years old vaccinated against polio.
27There have been breaks in the fighting to permit a vaccination campaign.
28The UN hopes to vaccinate 640,000 children in Gaza.
29The territory's first polio case in around 25 years was recently reported.
30UN officials said the campaign in the southern and central Gaza Strip had so far reached more than half of the children there needing the vaccine.
31Four weeks later, the children must get a second vaccination to complete the treatment.
32Tomah, the UN official, said 450,000 of the children targeted by the campaign had been vaccinated.
33I'm Mario Ritter, Jr.
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