Gaza: the only Catholic school reopens after three years of war

On 15 September 2026, the Holy Family school, attached to the only Catholic church in the Gaza Strip, reopened after nearly three years of closure imposed by the war. About a thousand pupils returned. The majority are Muslim; Christian children make up close to 13% of enrolment, according to George Akroush, director of the project development office of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

Where five Christian schools once served the territory — three Catholic, one evangelical Protestant and one Orthodox — every Christian pupil in Gaza now studies together in a single Christian school. A Catholic charity, whose delegation was on the ground to assess needs, reports that the war begun on 7 October 2023 has cost nearly 74,000 lives in the Gaza Strip.

The parish priest, Father Gabriel Romanelli, described a place wrested from the rubble: “There is almost no place in Gaza that has not been destroyed, the destruction is everywhere, but we have worked hard to make the school a clean place, where the children — who have been through so much — can feel safe.” The school, he said, will bring “a bit of normality,” “even if nothing is normal in Gaza,” and will be “like a light in the darkness for the local community that has known so much suffering.”

He indicated that it includes a psychosocial support programme, for the children as well as for traumatised teachers. “For the first time, all the Christian pupils of Gaza will study together in one Christian school,” Akroush added. “This creates a strong sense of community and shows that the Church remains close to them, accompanying them through all they are going through.”

What tradition teaches

The Church has always held the instruction of children to be a work of mercy and a grave duty, not a secular enterprise. Our Lord Himself rebuked those who turned the little ones away: “Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God” (Mark X, 14). To teach the ignorant and to comfort the afflicted are among the works of mercy that the Catechism of the Council of Trent enjoins upon every Christian. And the care of the young, wherever they are born and of whatever faith their parents may be, belongs to the maternal mission of the Church toward all men.

The measure

Measured by that rule, the act is right, and we say so as plainly as we would denounce a rupture. To reopen a school amid the ruins, to gather there a thousand children most of whom are not Catholic, to offer a clean and safe shelter to little ones whom the war has broken: this is the charity of the Church in its most ancient exercise. Presence kept where everything is destroyed — a priest, a classroom, a lamp — is itself a preaching. Father Romanelli's phrase, “a light in the darkness,” only restates the Gospel: “the light shineth in darkness” (John I, 5).

That Muslim and Christian children are taught there together in no way weakens this judgment: the Church has in every age opened her schools and her hospitals to whoever suffers, without disowning what she teaches. The duty of the faithful here is not protest but prayer and support: to bear before God the persecuted Church of the East, and to hold as true and perpetual this charity that the world admires without knowing whence it comes.

Sources. Gospel according to Saint Mark, X, 14, and according to Saint John, I, 5 (Vulgate); Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the spiritual and corporal works of mercy.