“Despite Global Outrage, Israel Is Still Blockading Our Children’s Education”

By Tariq Hathaleen | First published in +972 | May 5, 2026

It’s been three weeks since settlers fenced off my students’ path to school, trying to show that Umm Al-Khair has no future. We refuse to let them win.

On the morning of April 13, I returned to teaching after a month and a half without classes due to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. Like all the other teachers at my school, located near my village of Umm Al-Khair in the Masafer Yatta region of the occupied West Bank, I was eager to hear the familiar chatter of children’s voices filling the classrooms again, to see them back at their desks, and to resume the fragile routine of learning that we struggle so hard to maintain here in the South Hebron Hills.

But that morning, something was terribly wrong. More than 50 of our students were missing.

This was not because they did not want to come to school, or because their families had kept them home. They were absent because the dirt path connecting their homes to their school had been sealed off by Israeli settlers.

The previous night, the security guard from the settlement of Carmel, together with a teenage settler who lives there, installed a barbed wire fence across the valley path that the children of Umm Al-Khair have been using for over 40 years. By dawn, the route was gone.

The timing was not accidental. The settlers knew the children were supposed to return to school the next day after weeks of disruption due to the regional war. After losing a significant chunk of their education, our students were finally ready to come back to class. Instead, they woke up to find their path to education blocked.

After circling all the way around the settlement in my car, I joined the children’s parents at the newly-erected barrier. The students — some sitting on the ground, others standing patiently with their backpacks — stared quietly at the sharp metal coils that now separated them from their classrooms, as if simply waiting long enough might make them disappear.

As both their teacher and a resident of their village, watching them like that was one of the most painful moments I have experienced. These were children who simply wished to walk to their school safely; instead, they were being treated like intruders on their own land.

Soon after arriving, we called the Israeli police to report the fence that had been illegally erected overnight on private Palestinian land. Israeli soldiers arrived shortly after, but rather than helping they immediately started firing tear gas toward the children and their parents. 

Many students struggled to breathe as the smoke spread around us. Parents rushed forward to pull them away. That was how the blockade on our children’s education began, and it has continued every day for the past three weeks.

Since then, every school day has begun not in the classroom but at the barbed wire fence. At 7 a.m., when the children usually walk to school, they gather at the barrier alongside Palestinian, Israeli, and international activists, chanting at the soldiers stationed there and the settlement’s security guard to open the road, and holding signs demanding their right to an education.

For a moment, it seemed as if the world had finally taken notice. International journalists came to document what was happening. Human rights organizations spoke about the injustice. Images and videos of students standing behind the barbed wire spread across social media, including that of my beautiful 5-year-old niece Masa Bilal.

Yet despite the global attention and the outrage online, no authority has forced the settlers to remove the barrier. The path remains blocked.

The most painful aspect of this situation is the way our children are being used as instruments of pressure. The settlers understand that targeting education strikes at the heart of any community. By blocking the path to school, they are sending a message to the entire village: You have no future here.

And while it was settlers who physically installed the barrier, it is the Israeli government that is allowing this injustice to continue.

The meaning of resilience

Umm Al-Khair is an island surrounded by an ocean that wishes to erase it.

For decades, we have lived under the shadow of the settlement of Carmel, which encircles us and continues to expand onto our land. Our homes have been demolished; our access to our land restricted; our movement controlled. Every family here has stories of harassment, intimidation, and loss.

Since October 7, 2023, the situation has grown even harsher. Across the West Bank, settlers have intensified their attacks, while military restrictions on Palestinian movement have increased dramatically. In small communities like ours in Area C, daily life is being squeezed until leaving becomes the only option.

But we refuse, because we cannot afford not to. And because our children’s education is too important.

With the new barrier still up three weeks later, families have begun driving the children to school using a long, rough road that circles around the settlement. It takes far more time, costs money that many families do not have, and exposes the children to new dangers. Settlers have already blocked parts of that road with rocks in an attempt to make the alternative journey impossible as well.

People often describe the residents of Umm Al-Khair as “resilient.” Sometimes I think that word does not fully capture the reality of what we must do simply to sustain the appearance of a normal life.

Resilience here means children picking up their schoolbags each morning and traveling three kilometers to school when the normal route has been blocked by settlers. It means knowing that every day will bring another challenge — a fence, a demolition order, an attack, a murder — and choosing to continue anyway. 

It means teachers opening classrooms, even when half the seats are empty, so children will know they always have a place of learning available to them. It means refusing to disappear.

The ghosts in our classrooms

When I stand in my classroom, I often think about the teachers who stood here before me. One of them was our beloved Awdah Hathaleen, who was not only a teacher but a voice for our community and a symbol of non-violent resistance to the Israeli occupation.

Last July, Awdah was shot dead by an Israeli settler who had invaded our land, as he stood filming from over 30 meters away. He was only 31 years old. He left behind a wife, three young children, and a community that still feels the emptiness of the void he left behind.

For me, Awdah was more than a brother. We grew up together. We did everything together. We were almost like a person and his shadow.

Tariq Hathaleen is an activist, English teacher and a community leader from Umm Al-Khair

Source: +972