The classroom record: what UN data shows about Palestine refugee schooling

A school system created by mandate

UNRWA — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East — was established by the UN General Assembly in 1949 to provide assistance and protection to Palestine refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. ¹

A 2024 UNRWA baseline report describes the agency as unique among General Assembly–mandated UN bodies in being a direct provider of education, operating one of the largest school systems in the Middle East and providing free basic education to over half a million refugee children and youth. ²

The scale, in the agency's own figures

UNRWA's education page states that it operates 706 elementary and preparatory schools across its five fields, including eight secondary schools in Lebanon, serving some 543,075 children; eight vocational training centres for about 8,000 students; and two educational science faculties, one in the West Bank and one in Jordan. It also states that since the 1960s girls have made up around half of its students. ³

Figures differ between UNRWA publications because they are compiled on different dates. Its August 2026 factsheet gives a figure of more than 520,000 students enrolled in learning and education programmes. We report each figure with its source rather than combining them. ^{4 3}

Gaza: the pre-war baseline

UNRWA's “UNRWA in Action” publication of June 2025 records that before the war began in October 2023 the agency operated 288 schools in the Gaza Strip, attended by more than 300,000 boys and girls and staffed by more than 10,500 education personnel. For data valid at the end of 2024, it lists Gaza school and student counts as not available. ⁵

Those two facts — a documented baseline and an absence of current comparable figures — are themselves part of the record. Current conditions are reported in UNRWA situation reports and in the attributed coverage in our news feed. ⁵

What this feature does not claim

This is a desk-researched feature built only from published UN documents. It contains no interviews with students or teachers and makes no assessment of learning outcomes beyond what the sources state.