NEW YORK: Around 500 million of the world’s children are being denied access to basic education, Gordon Brown, the UN special envoy for global education, warned on Thursday.

Among them are 660,000 Palestinian children in Gaza, where nearly 97 percent of school buildings and facilities have been destroyed by Israel since late 2023.

“The pressure to provide education is there, particularly in the Palestinian case; education is so important to the future of the Palestinian people,” he told Arab News at a briefing during the UN General Assembly.

“I think we’re all haunted by the fact that there’s so much need, and the resources aren’t yet available to meet that need, particularly children facing trauma.”

Brown called for action to educate the 273 million children worldwide out of school on any given day, and the 270 million in school but not learning enough to become literate or numerate.

Education Cannot Wait, a global fund established by the UN in 2016 to support education in emergencies and protracted crises, announced $3 million in seed funding to build pop-up preschools for children in Gaza.

Maysa Jalbout, the head of ECW, told Arab News: “We’re going to be able to reach up to 13,000 of the children who’ve been disabled because of injuries during the war.”

She said communities in Gaza and conflict-stricken Sudan and Afghanistan have built grassroots educational initiatives and are not waiting for the international community to bring children back to school.

“There are teachers in Gaza who are teaching on top of the rubble, in Sudan inside tents, in Afghanistan in basements,” she added.

“What we need to do is to make sure that the international funding, the little that we do have, meets them where they are and helps them expand access to education.”

The UN Relief and Works Agency announced last week that 280,000 children in Gaza have started school in tents for the new school year.

The temporary facilities lack desks and the curriculum is limited to core classes: Arabic, maths, science and English.