Gaza’s only Catholic school reopens after 3-year closure

A Catholic school in the war-torn Gaza Strip reopened its doors this week after being closed for nearly three years.

Holy Family School, attached to Gaza’s only Catholic church, Holy Family Parish, welcomed approximately 1,000 students back to school on Sept. 15, according to the Catholic aid group Aid to the Church in Need (ACN).

Holy Family’s parish priest, Father Gabriel Romanelli, told a visiting delegation from ACN that he hopes the reopening of the school “will bring some sense of normality” to the students and their families, “even though nothing is normal in Gaza.”

“There is almost nowhere in Gaza that has not been destroyed, destruction is all around,” Romanelli said, “but we have worked hard to make the school a clean environment, where the children — who have been through so much — can feel safe.”

The ACN delegation was in Gaza to assess local needs during the ongoing war with Israel, which began Oct. 7, 2023, and which has taken nearly 74,000 lives in the Gaza Strip, according to the aid group.

The majority of the 1,000 students at the school are Muslim, according to George Akroush, director of the project development office of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. Christian students make up about 13% of the student population.

“For the first time, all Christian students in Gaza will be studying together in one Christian school,” Akroush told ACN. “This creates a strong sense of community and shows that the Church remains close to them, accompanying them in the midst of all they are going through.”

Previously, five Christian schools served Gaza: three Catholic, one evangelical Protestant, and one Orthodox.

Romanelli said he hopes the reopened school will be “like a light in the darkness for the local community that has experienced so much suffering.”

“Everyone in Gaza is carrying so much trauma,” he said, telling ACN the school is incorporating a psychosocial support program “that will be an important part of what we do with the children” as well as the teachers, many of whom “are so traumatized, and it is almost as if they are not the same people who we knew before the start of the war.”

He said he hopes that when Gazans, who have begun returning to the devastated region, see the “students coming in their uniforms to the school, it shows them that there is a future,” he added.

The priest said he takes families to the beach on Sundays after Mass, “even though the water in the beach is filled with rubble — everywhere in Gaza is filled with rubble,” because “we want to have some time of recreation for the families.”

“The needs in Gaza are enormous,” he continued, saying the students have asked him to keep the school open for after-school activities because “we have nothing to do and nowhere to go.”