Northern Israeli students face uncertain school year as conflict with Hezbollah persists

By Nadeen Ebrahim, Sarah Boxer and Jim Sciutto, CNN

Rosh Pina and Kibbutz Magal, Israel (CNN) — With one year left until graduation, 17-year-old Ziv Zinger hopes to begin the academic year on September 1 like other students across Israel. But that hope remains uncertain for him and others from the country’s Northern District, who are grappling with the reality of displacement as Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon drags on without resolution.

He is among more than a thousand students who, before the October 7 war, attended the Har VaGai Regional High School in the Dafna kibbutz (agricultural commune), less than two miles from the border with Lebanon.

The school was forced to shut when Israel ordered border communities to evacuate as the Israeli military and Hezbollah began exchanging fire. Just last month, a rocket burst through the empty school’s gym.

Some 62,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes in the north of the country since the evacuation order almost a year ago.

Zinger said he feels “cheated” by not being able to return to his school in Dafna. After October 7, schools shut for a month, he said, after which students spent the rest of the academic year in hybrid learning that alternated between online classes and other school locations.

“(I) feel very connected to the old school,” he told CNN. Students had access to “grass, a river flowing through the school. It was very open.”

Hezbollah said its attacks are in response to Israel’s war in Gaza, which was launched after Hamas-led militants attacked the country on October 7, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli authorities. The war has killed more than 40,600 people in Gaza, according to the health ministry there.

The Israel-Hezbollah crossfire extending several kilometers into both countries’ territory, along with the subsequent evacuation order in Israel, has impacted more than 16,000 Israeli students, the country’s ministry of education said.

Across the border in Lebanon, where authorities say more than 94,000 people have been displaced, at least 70 schools have closed with around 20,000 students affected, according to UNICEF. The country’s education system was already “on the brink of collapse” before the conflict due to years of being overstretched, it said. As Lebanon faced a crippling economic crisis, public school teachers went on a months-long strike in late 2022, leaving classrooms empty. The war has only compounded the situation.

The conflict between Hezbollah and Israel started just a day before the Lebanese academic year was to start, leaving schools and teachers unable to find immediate alternatives, Khaled Al-Fayed, an official at the Lebanese education ministry, was cited as saying by Asharq Al Awsat newspaper. The government eventually made arrangements to move students to schools in safer areas and made distance learning available to those who were trapped in their villages.

Maysoun Chehab, UNESCO’s chief of education for Lebanon, told The National newspaper however that bad internet connectivity, the lack of electronic devices in some homes and inadequate teacher training are major hurdles for distance learning in the country. Twenty-two children have died in Lebanon from Israeli strikes since October, according to the ministry of health.

Makeshift schools in Israel

South of Israel’s evacuation zone, makeshift schools are now emerging nearly 11 months into the war as part of an effort to return children to classrooms.

In the northern town of Rosh Pina, some 46 kilometers (27 miles) from the Lebanon border, an empty factory is being repurposed to accommodate students of Har VaGai, where Zinger was a student for three years. He’s glad a new school is being built for them, but said it won’t “feel like home.”

Spanning some 17 acres, the three-building factory is being revamped to accommodate more than 1,000 students, Ravit Rosental, principal of the school, told CNN.

Despite the efforts to move the students to relative safety, fears persist. The makeshift school is outside the evacuation zone but it’s still within range of Hezbollah’s projectiles. It is equipped with 18 external bomb shelters, as well as several safe rooms within each building. “We are afraid. I cannot say that I am not afraid,” Rosental said.

Children riding on school buses in the area are at risk of being hit by rockets, missiles, drones or even failed interceptions, she said. “We have a lot of problems on the roads,” she said.

Sirens blared across the unfinished school just a day before CNN’s visit, according to Palestinian workers at the site, who showed videos of the Iron Dome missile defense system intercepting projectiles in the sky.

Rosental told CNN that she is “not so confident” that the school will be operational by September 1.

The war shows no signs of abating. In a fresh round of escalation, the Israeli military launched what it called “preemptive” strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon on Sunday, as the Iran-backed militant group said it carried out its own attacks in response to the killing of a top commander.

In a video statement that day, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “what happened today is not the end,” while Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said that further strikes could be carried out against Israel.

‘Russian roulette’ with children’s lives

Officials in the north of the country fear their district may never return to normalcy.

“We are playing Russian roulette with the lives of our children,” Amit Sofer, the head of the Merom HaGalil Council in northern Israel, told Israeli news outlet Ynet. “There is no protection, there is no security,” he said, adding that “in the current situation, I don’t see the education system resuming on the conflict line.”

Pressure has been mounting on the Israeli government to restore security in the north, bring evacuees home and resume the new academic year on time.

Far-right ministers of the ruling coalition have been pushing Netanyahu not only to press on with the war in Gaza, but to launch a “decisive war” against Hezbollah as well.

Some officials in the north share that sentiment. Mayors from the Northern District have threatened to cut contact with Netanyahu’s government unless their demands are met.

“For eleven months there has been a security strip within the territory of the State of Israel and the government is silent,” David Azoulay, the head of the Metula settlement council in the north, said in a statement. “Soon, another sad school year outside our homes and the government is silent.”

Azoulay said he wanted to see the government “act physically” and “act to remove the threat and return us to our homes.”

Hezbollah has vowed to continue attacking the Jewish state until Israel stops its war in Gaza.

Israel’s northern front was a point of contention in Netanyahu’s war cabinet before it was disbanded in June. The prime minister had reportedly told the cabinet that September 1 did not have to be the “goal date” to start the school year, according to Israel’s Channel 12.

“Why do we keep taking about this date, what will happen if they go back a few months later?” the prime minister reportedly said in response to pressure from former war cabinet member Benny Gantz to stick to the official date, according to Channel 12.

CNN has reached out to the prime minister’s office for comment.

Asked if the school year would resume on time, the Israeli education ministry told CNN that “the Northern District is prepared and ready to receive students and to start the school year as scheduled,” but that “should the security situation worsen, we will issue appropriate instructions to the schools accordingly.”

Parents of students who are forced to attend new schools say they hope their children experience a sense of normalcy soon.

Meirav Atmor, mother of 12-year-old Matan, said her son is longing to return to school, but that the war brings daily anxieties.

“It’s very stressful when there are sirens,” Matan told CNN, sitting next to his mother in their home in Rosh Pina, adding that he has had to learn where shelters are and how to take cover when needed.

The war has had a huge effect on both parents and their children, Atmor said. It is “not normal” for a mother to be worried about the impact of war on her son, she said.

“It is not a normal reality for a young boy to deal with,” she added. “And that’s sad. That’s very sad.”

Zinger, the 17-year-old, said it has been a rough year for him. While previous generations in Israel have experienced war, for many young Israelis like him, it’s a new and unsettling experience.

“(For) everyone my age, this is the first real war,” he said, adding that the even younger generation will be forced to grow up “in the reality of war.”

“People’s lives have been changed.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

CNN’s Dana Karni and Lauren Izso contributed to this report.