Back to School in Wartime
Students in Sderot navigate emotional challenges—and missile attacks—as the new academic year approaches

Courtesy the author

Courtesy the author
Courtesy the author
Courtesy the author
Workers tackled vacation-time maintenance, the whir of drills and bangs of hammered nails on the outside walls of the Alonim Shaar Hanegev Elementary School piercing the July morning’s quiet. Freshly painted welcome placards were done, nearly two months ahead of pupils’ arrival on Sept. 1 to begin the 2024-25 term. Signs in a classroom read, “Welcome, first grade, to Alonim” and “A successful school year.” In the administrative building’s foyer, another sign said, “We’re starting the year at Alonim. It begins with a step. It begins with a dream.”
The scene would be typical on a summer’s day, but this was in Sderot, a town of 30,000 in the northern Negev. Located just a mile from the northeast corner of the Gaza Strip, Sderot, which had suffered countless rockets launched by Palestinians since 2001, saw more than 70 of its people—police officers, civilian defenders, and residents—killed during Hamas’ Oct. 7 invasion.
As the Israel Defense Forces fought Hamas throughout the Strip in the ensuing months, security gradually returned to the Israeli side of the border area known as the Gaza Envelope, which includes Sderot and smaller communities. That led the national government to encourage residents to return home from the hotels and communities to which they’d been evacuated on Oct. 7—including by phasing out funding for their living expenses under relocation. In early March, with most residents back, Sderot’s schools reopened.
Approximately 90% of Sderot’s population is now back home, said Suzie Ben Harush, an Education Ministry spokeswoman who lives in the Negev. Approximately 26,000 children, in kindergarten through 12th grade, attend schools in the Gaza Envelope, she said.
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A new academic year offers a fresh start—and Sderot certainly could use that. But while Sderot’s school plans seem set for 2024-25, questions remain elsewhere in the Gaza Envelope about what schools will open, where, and who will attend them.
Schools’ status in the area’s four other regional councils—akin to American counties—is a hodgepodge:
• Sdot Hanegev (south of Sderot) will start the school year much the same as before, except for the residents of Kibbutz Saad who are pushing for schooling to be closer to home, at least temporarily.
• Three schools in Hof Ashkelon (ringing the city of Ashkelon) will open farther away at the Kfar Silver youth village, east of the city; Nitzan, farther north; and Kibbutz Yad Mordechai. Pupils at Moshav Netiv Haasara, adjacent to Gaza’s northern border, are slated to attend school at Yad Mordechai, but residents haven’t returned to the moshav.
• Shaar Hanegev, where the Alonim school is located at Sderot’s southern edge, is less settled: Pupils from such devastated kibbutzim as Nahal Oz, Kfar Aza, and Mefalsim were relocated to the town of Kiryat Gat and may be attending school this year in trailers at Kibbutz Ruhama, east of Sderot. But parents in those families oppose that option because it means longer commutes for their kids, and thus additional exposure to possible missile attacks.
• The situation in Eshkol, encompassing the more spread-out communities of the southern Envelope, “is much more complicated,” Ben Harush said. Eshkol had three elementary schools and one high school, all located at Kibbutz Magen in a complex known as Kiryat HaChinuch (Education Borough). One of those elementary schools and the high school will open on-site and on time. Another elementary school will move to trailers at Kibbutz Gvulot—a decision made only in late July, after shifting to an existing school building in the town of Netivot was considered. The third elementary school will relocate to a building being repositioned in Zohar, near the Sinai-Gaza border.
“The Education Ministry is considering [various] ideas. Every day, we’re solving one more small part of the puzzle so studies can open as scheduled on Sept. 1,” Ben Harush said.
Things could be far worse. Hezbollah’s near-daily bombardment of Israel’s Galilee region, which forced the continued evacuation of nearly all 60,000 people living near the border with Lebanon, means that schools there have no chance of reopening when the new term begins.
Open shops, occupied tables at Eitan’s Schawarma and other lunch joints on Yigal Allon Street, and busy roads on a broiling-hot July afternoon lent an appearance of normalcy to Sderot during my recent visit, an image the town has projected during the more than two decades it’s endured Hamas’ missile attacks.
But the complex reality can’t hide. A banner draped down the facade of a health maintenance organization’s clinic praised medical professionals treating evacuated Israelis dispersed throughout the country. Thumps echoed occasionally, reassuring residents with the IDF’s shelling of Hamas targets in Gaza.
Then there was the vacant lot at the corner of Herzl and Mivtza Kadesh streets. If the Nova music-festival massacre site at Kibbutz Reim is the most notorious of the Oct. 7 locations, this might be the second-most.
A two-story, white-tiled building had stood on that corner: Sderot’s police station. Hamas terrorists targeted it, fought Israeli police officers, and seized the station. Israeli forces recaptured it on Oct. 8 and leveled the structure.
Rubble, twisted metal, and sun-faded Israeli flags dot the plot now. Tins of used memorial candles crowd a concrete base of a light stanchion decorated with stickers of killed IDF soldiers and police officers. Penned messages of gratitude and apology appear on painted rocks. “We remember the murdered and the fallen in Sderot on the 7th of October,” reads a black banner’s headline above the names of the town’s civilian and military dead. A blue billboard at the back of the property explains what occurred at the police station last October. “A memorial will be established on this site,” it reads.
Courtesy the author
Three uniformed female soldiers walked by and stopped briefly to gaze at the lot. Looking on from across the street, a group of visiting teenage boys from South Africa took in a tour guide’s explanation of the battle.
In The Passage hamburger joint 200 yards down Herzl and through a short alley, the manager, O.S., bemoaned the 30% drop in business even now, four months after most of Sderot’s residents returned.
“People are trying to rebuild their lives and their financial situation. They’re not so much looking to enjoy themselves,” said O.S., who allowed only his initials to be used because he’s still serving in the IDF, in the Golani Brigade. He knew one of the police officers whom Hamas killed at the station. Whenever he walks by, he purposefully looks at the empty lot.
In his free time, O.S., who is 24, patronizes local pubs and restaurants or hangs out with friends—and appreciates leisure time following his four-month stint fighting in Gaza.
“I love the town, I’ve been here all my life, and I’m sorry to see how it is now,” he told me.
O.S.’s great-grandmother moved from Morocco to Sderot in the 1950s, and the family has never left. He’s adamant about staying.
“It’s my home. If we leave, the border will move to Beersheba. Then what? The border will move to Kiryat Gat. Then what? It’s my home. I’m not going to leave,” he said.
Air raid sirens still sound occasionally in Sderot, he said, but incoming missiles sometimes land without an alert sounding. Somehow, he slept better in Gaza than he does in Sderot. That’s because he feels clarity in the rightness of the IDF’s mission to defeat Hamas.
“You don’t have any worries—not work, not paying rent. Just fight,” he said. “It’s just you versus evil. You’ll deal with everything else afterward.”
Drowning in grief is understandable—but not an option, said Shlomtsion Cohen, Alonim’s principal.
Her school knows grief. Two teachers and one pupil were murdered on Oct. 7. Seven pupils were kidnapped (they were released in November in a deal between Israel and Hamas), and one parent remains captive in Gaza. Alumni and their parents were murdered and kidnapped.
“We feel like we’re in an extended shiva,” Cohen told me in an interview in her office. “That makes our recovery difficult. It’s very hard to be happy.”
Throughout last year’s wide dispersion of pupils, teachers, and their families—to Haifa, Tiberias, the Dead Sea environs, the Jezreel Valley, Herzliya, Eilat, and the Jerusalem and Netanya outskirts—Cohen maintained contact with nearly everyone, intent on preserving the school’s bonds. She occasionally brought teachers together, pupils together, and both groups together. When, early on, some children feared that Alonim had been torched (it was not), she reassured them by compiling a video of staff members waving, blowing kisses, and speaking to them. Some of the teachers shaped their two hands into a heart. Emotions rendered some teachers speechless on camera.
During our conversation, Cohen often employed the Hebrew word khosen, fortitude—often in this phrase: khosen rigshi, emotional fortitude. It’s what we Americans would call resilience.
It’s a trait Cohen said she strives to build in the youngsters. Cohen’s explanation suggested that she carefully balances the need to address a challenge directly while immunizing children against its debilitating effects. For the return in March and now September’s return, that means evincing sensitivity toward kids experiencing an emotional whirlpool while maintaining learning standards. A smile and a hug alongside homework assignments and deadlines.
Empathy and learning always go hand-in-hand at school—in wartime, more so, said Shahar Bart, who teaches grades 1-3 at the school. “A kid needs to be seen, heard, paid attention to,” she said. “We really want to return to what we have.”
In more normal times, even former students and their parents would call her occasionally. Since Oct. 7, those conversations have been “more sensitive,” she said.
Heading into the new term, counselors and psychologists are prepared to address pupils’ emotional needs, including by providing pet therapy and art therapy. Cohen figures that “not some of the kids, but 100%” are experiencing turmoil from Oct. 7. As the term progresses, “we’ll see who needs more [attention] and who’s OK,” she said. But, she said, “we can’t spend the whole day on treatments. There must be a routine.”
“There are lots of crises here. We must arise from the crises. There’s no other choice,” Cohen said. “I don’t want to focus only on the bereavement. We must focus on life. I’m not a [military] chief of general staff or a prime minister. I’m a school principal. I’m in a challenging job in a not-so-easy time.”
Elsewhere in Sderot that afternoon, at the Gil Rabin School, Nisim Zuviv came to pick up his grandchildren. They’re pupils at the school—they’ll be entering grades 4 and 6—but are there this summer to attend day camp.
Zuviv thinks the new academic year promises greater normalcy for kids, but he’s concerned by last year’s turbulence having caused his grandchildren to miss so much material from the curriculum, material he figures won’t ever be made up. His and his wife’s whole family—their three married children and three grandkids—were relocated together with them post-Oct. 7 to Eilat, and schooling was a headache. The grandkids attended classes at a local school but at the unusual time of 1:30 to 4:30 p.m., after local pupils went home. A month later, the evacuees attended classes at more conventional times, but in a building, an incomplete college, ill-suited to young people. Even with their friends also attending, he said, it was a difficult adjustment.
The grandkids’ reacclimation to Sderot in March was a mixed bag, Zuviv said. He figured they would hesitate to play outside, fearing terrorists. He was wrong. But if his grandson wants to retrieve an item from his family’s fortified room, where he hid on Oct. 7, he still wants an adult to accompany him.
Returning to normalcy “will take a while,” he said.
Sderot’s deputy mayor, Elad Kalimi, thinks so, too. The municipality is increasing its education budget for the 2024-25 term by 60 million shekels ($16.5 million) for additional staffing to bolster tutoring and address mental health challenges kids in elementary schools and high schools are facing post-Oct. 7.
The additional funding comes from the national government, U.S.-based Jewish community federations, and Israeli corporations, said Kalimi, whose son and daughter study in the Sderot school system.
Many of Sderot’s schoolchildren are grappling with what Kalimi called “post-trauma syndrome,” an array of mental health challenges that include suicidal ideation, eating disorders, an unwillingness to leave home, domestic violence, and divorce. “We’re dealing with it. It will take time,” he said. “Crises always lead to opportunities to flourish, to be even better.”
Hillel Kuttler, a writer and editor, can be reached at [email protected].