Education Under Fire:
How Wars Are Destroying a Generation of Students

In 2024, a university student in Gaza described her classroom being reduced to rubble in a single airstrike. In Yemen, a teacher walked four hours each day to reach a half-demolished school where she had gone eighteen consecutive months without a salary. In Syria, a 19-year-old who had dreamed of studying engineering crossed into Lebanon with nothing but his textbooks — only to discover that refugee status made university enrollment nearly impossible.

These are not isolated stories. They represent the lived reality of millions of students caught inside some of the world’s most prolonged and brutal conflicts. Wars in Gaza, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon have not only destroyed buildings — they have systematically dismantled entire generations’ access to education.

This investigation draws on data from UNICEF, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the Gaza Ministry of Education, and international humanitarian reports to document what these wars have done to students — and what it means for the next thirty years.

Gaza: The Collapse of an Entire Education System

Before October 2023, Gaza had approximately 650,000 students enrolled across more than 800 schools and colleges — many operated by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. In the space of weeks, that entire system was functionally destroyed.

According to UNICEF and the Gaza Ministry of Education, more than 5,000 students were killed in the first year of the conflict. Total student and child deaths are estimated to exceed 12,800. Thousands more sustained permanent injuries that will affect their ability to learn and work for the rest of their lives.

Schools that were not destroyed were repurposed as shelters, housing hundreds of thousands of displaced families in buildings designed for a few hundred students. Multiple shelter schools were subsequently struck during conflict, resulting in further casualties among displaced populations seeking safety inside them.

The University Catastrophe

Gaza was home to several universities including the Islamic University of Gaza, Al-Azhar University Gaza, and the University of Palestine. By early 2024, monitoring organizations confirmed that every one of these institutions had been completely destroyed or rendered non-functional. Tens of thousands of university students lost not only their campus but their academic records, transcripts, and in many cases the professors who had supervised their studies.

Yemen: A Decade of Lost Classrooms

Yemen’s civil war began in 2015, making it one of the world’s longest-running active conflicts. Unlike the rapid destruction in Gaza, Yemen’s education catastrophe has unfolded slowly and with devastating thoroughness over more than a decade.

More than 2,900 schools across Yemen have been destroyed, damaged, or converted into military positions or shelters according to Education Cluster Yemen reports. Of those still standing, hundreds operate without supplies, running water, or sanitation.

Perhaps most troubling is the generational compounding of the crisis. Children who were five years old when the war began are now teenagers who have never experienced a stable school year. For many, the critical window for foundational literacy and numeracy — which educational psychologists identify as most important between ages five and twelve — has partially or entirely closed.

Syria: Displaced Students Across Borders

The Syrian civil war, which began in 2011, triggered the largest refugee crisis in the world at that time. Over six million Syrians fled internationally, with millions more displaced internally. Among them were hundreds of thousands of university students and millions of school-age children.

Research from humanitarian organizations tracking Syrian refugees in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Europe found that many refugee children face severe learning deficits after years of interrupted schooling, with significant portions of older refugee children struggling with literacy skills they should have acquired years earlier.

The University Displacement Problem

For Syrian students who were mid-degree when the war escalated, the situation became extraordinarily difficult. Many faced the loss of academic records, the closure of their universities, and the near-impossibility of having credentials recognized in host countries.

In Lebanon alone — which hosted over a million Syrian refugees — students found themselves excluded from public universities due to legal status, unable to afford private tuition, and often forced into informal labor simply to survive. UNHCR estimated that only a small fraction of Syrian refugee youth of university age were actually enrolled in higher education anywhere.

Iraq: Universities Caught in the ISIS Conflict

During the ISIS conflict in Iraq between 2014 and 2017, several major universities were captured, destroyed, or severely damaged. Mosul University — one of Iraq’s oldest academic institutions — suffered catastrophic damage during the battle to recapture the city, with its library, laboratories, and classrooms extensively destroyed.

Even after the end of active combat, unexploded ordnance left on campuses created safety hazards that delayed reopening for months or years. Thousands of faculty members had fled the country and, in many cases, did not return. International reconstruction efforts helped rebuild portions of Mosul University by 2019, though it continued operating significantly below pre-conflict capacity for years afterward.

Lebanon: A Crisis Built on Top of Crisis

Lebanon’s situation is uniquely complex because it represents the compounding of multiple simultaneous crises — economic collapse, a massive refugee population, political paralysis, the 2020 Beirut port explosion, and cross-border conflict — all layered on decades of regional instability.

Studies from education researchers and humanitarian organizations found that Lebanese students have lost a significant portion of effective classroom learning time over the past decade, due to school closures from funding shortfalls, teacher strikes, displacement caused by southern Lebanon conflict, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Lebanese pound’s catastrophic devaluation — losing over 90% of its value since 2019 — has made private school fees unaffordable for vast portions of the population. Public schools, already overcrowded by the refugee population, face supply deficits and a severe shortage of qualified teachers willing to work for wages now worth a fraction of their pre-crisis value.

Why Education Systems Are Destroyed in Conflict

It would be a mistake to assume the destruction of schools and universities in conflict zones is purely incidental. Research on conflict and education documents that educational infrastructure is sometimes deliberately targeted — by both state and non-state actors — because controlling access to knowledge is a form of power and social control.

Beyond deliberate targeting, wars destroy education through several structural forces: displacement makes sustained school enrollment impossible for families that move repeatedly; economic collapse eliminates government education budgets and teacher salaries; teacher flight strips schools of their most critical human resource; and trauma creates lasting cognitive and psychological barriers that impair learning even when children are physically present in a classroom.

Together these forces create what researchers call the education poverty trap: when an entire cohort of children loses access to education during formative years, the lost human capital is effectively irreversible on any short or medium time horizon. The economic and social consequences compound and persist for generations.