When the sirens blare in Beirut, 17‑year‑old Ahmad Melhem pauses his tablet and looks up. Around him, a classroom that was once a place of chalk and exams has become a crowded shelter, divided by plastic curtains, mattresses scattered across the floor, and a small stove doubling as a communal kitchen. In this fragile space, education is no longer a given; it is a quiet act of resistance.
Melhem, displaced from Beirut’s southern suburbs, is one of nearly half a million Lebanese students forced out of school by the war. Since large‑scale Israeli strikes and a ground offensive in the south began in early March, over 350 public schools have been converted into shelters, while others in targeted areas have simply shut their doors. The United Nations children’s agency, Unicef, warns that the war is not only killing and displacing families but also dismantling an entire generation’s future.
Inside the shelter‑classroom, Melhem sets up his books and a screen, chasing a flickering digital thread to stay in school. His private high school has tried to continue with distance learning, cutting subjects and shortening lessons, but the reality is uneven. There is no Internet in the room; an NGO provides access only in the yard, where children play and adults gather. The noise distracts him, so he watches recorded lessons later, often exhausted. “I don’t want to regret not finishing my studies despite the difficult circumstances,” said Melhem. “In‑person class is better and more engaging,” he said. “I miss group work and the science projects we used to do.”
According to a 2023 World Bank report, each day of public school closures costs the Lebanese economy three million dollars.
For a teenager dreaming of studying and aspiring for a top career, every lost lesson feels like a step towards a future he might never claim.
Across Lebanon, older students preparing for university exams face the same pressure. Unicef’s head of education in the country, Atif Rafique, warns of rising dropout risks, especially among girls and adolescent women, who may be pushed into early marriage.
Beyond the shelters, the scale of the “digital divide” is stark. In the northern suburb of Dekwaneh, another teenager, Aya Zahran, shares a single phone with her siblings in a vocational institute turned shelter. The link her school sent for online classes often fails; the institute has neither stable Internet nor enough devices. Zahran, like Melhem, is displaced from the southern suburbs. Instead of studying, her days are filled with preparing food and helping to keep the shelter liveable. Rafique said hundreds of public schools lack the resources for distance learning, and noted a “big digital divide” when it comes to Internet access, with teachers also affected.
Unicef has responded with an online platform of recorded lessons and a phone‑based hotline that lets students request materials without Internet, but these are stopgap measures in a country where the economy is already in crisis. He said children in south Lebanon have been disproportionately affected by education interruptions since the last round of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah broke out in October 2023. The conflict that pulled Lebanon into the wider Middle East war has reignited long‑standing pain.
Just a week before the current round of hostilities, Unicef had reopened 30 previously damaged schools in the south, steps towards recovery now erased.
At the vocational institute’s entrance, an education ministry employee was registering children to assess what educational services they need.
“The situation here is very difficult... there’s no Internet here, and not even pens,” said Nasima Ismail, who has been displaced from the northeast Bekaa region, as she signed up her children. “My children are top students. I don’t want them to miss out on their education, as happened to us when we were kids,” said Ismail, recalling Lebanon’s devastating 1975-1990 civil war. “I want them to complete their education, even if we are left with nothing,” she said.
“I wish them days better than ours.” — AFP