The Right to Education: A Casualty of War

How Lebanon's Decision to Open Schools as Shelters Violated the Rights of Its Own Students

In the chaos of war, the Lebanese government made a decision that was framed as humanitarian. It opened public schools as collective shelters for displaced families. What was not framed — what was not discussed, debated, or even acknowledged — is what that decision cost another group of children entirely: the students who were already enrolled in those schools and who, overnight, lost their classrooms, their teachers, their routines, and their right to learn.

This article is not about the displaced. It is about the forgotten.

A Decision Made Without Them

The Ministry of Education placed 1,156 public schools and high schools, along with 75 vocational institutes, at the disposal of the national disaster authority. This was presented as crisis management. But it was also a unilateral decision to suspend the education rights of tens of thousands of enrolled students — without any parallel plan to protect those rights.

A total of 472 schools — public, private, and TVET — have been used as collective shelters, restricting access to education for thousands of students.  For the children who called these schools their own, no alternative was ready. No emergency learning spaces were designated. No timeline was given. They were simply told, in effect: your education can wait.

This Is Not the First Time

What makes this failure especially inexcusable is that Lebanon has done this before. Some children have returned to the same schools where they previously sheltered during the 2024 escalation, compounding the long-term disruption caused by Lebanon's economic collapse, the Beirut Port explosion, and the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Lebanese schools have already endured over a decade of compounded crises, during which children have lost up to 60% of school time over the past six years. Since 2018, students have missed more than 760 teaching days due to strikes, disruptions, and closures. The government knew this history. It chose the same playbook anyway.

Remote Learning Is Not an Equal Substitute

The government's answer to displaced students — and implicitly, to students whose schools became shelters — was remote learning. This is not a solution. It is the appearance of one.

A mothers have protested that remote learning had already proven ineffective during the COVID-19 crisis, especially for younger children.The head of the union of parents' committees in private schools described the ministry's plan as flexible but stressed that implementation remains the real challenge, and that remote education is not equally accessible and its effectiveness is limited. 

Financial pressures, exacerbated by the war, have further disrupted education. 77% of parents and 66% of teachers said the conflict had reduced their incomes amid rising living costs.  A child who cannot afford internet, who has no device, who has no quiet corner in a shared apartment or a relative's home — that child's right to education was not protected. It was quietly abandoned.

The Legal Framework the Government Ignored

Lebanon is a state party to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Article 28 guarantees every child the right to education — not conditionally, not when convenient, but as a binding obligation of the state. Article 3 requires that the best interests of the child be a primary consideration in all actions by public authorities.

Using schools as shelters — without a concurrent, mandatory, child-rights-compliant education continuity plan — is not a neutral emergency measure. It is a policy choice that treats children's education as expendable. It subordinates one group of children's rights to the needs of another, without ever asking: how do we protect both?

The answer exists. Emergency learning spaces, temporary school-in-a-box programs, accelerated double-shift scheduling in unaffected schools — these are not innovations. They are established humanitarian standards. The Lebanese government implemented none of them systematically.

The Compounding Cost

Even with the ceasefire following the 2024 escalation, school attendance remained low, with over 25% of children still out of school weeks later, as compared to 65% during the war itself.  School closures do not end when the physical conflict subsides. Children who fall out of educational rhythm take months — sometimes years — to return. Some never do.

The study found that only 19% of teachers in areas heavily affected by the fighting considered restarting education a high priority  — not because they did not care, but because the system had given them no resources, no guidance, and no realistic path forward. The failure cascades: from government to institution, from institution to teacher, from teacher to child.

iHOPE's Position

The right to education is not a luxury to be suspended in emergencies. It is precisely in emergencies that it becomes most critical — as a source of structure, safety, and continuity for children whose entire world has been upended.

iHOPE Foundation calls on the Lebanese government to treat education continuity as a non-negotiable component of any emergency response, not an afterthought. Specifically, we call for a mandatory child-rights impact assessment before any public school is designated as a displacement shelter; the immediate establishment of alternative learning spaces — in community centers, mosques, churches, or adjacent facilities — for every school converted to a shelter; investment in offline, device-light learning tools that function without reliable internet or electricity; and a formal, government-led plan for academic recovery for every student whose school year has been disrupted — not just an extended calendar, but a structured remediation program.

Lebanon's children who were already in school when this war escalated did not lose their right to education on March 2, 2026. The government took it from them — quietly, without a plan, and without apology.

They deserve better. They deserve to be seen.

This Article was prepared by: Walid Bassal

Meet the Author:

Walid Bassal is a legal researcher, advocate, and law student at the Lebanese University Faculty of Law, where he actively engages in academic legal activities. Notably, Walid participated in the Model Youth Parliament (MYP), a premier parliamentary simulation in Lebanon organized by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom (FNF) in collaboration with Université Saint-Joseph de Beyrouth (USJ), where he represented one of 128 students from Lebanese universities in drafting, debating, and voting on legislation addressing critical socio-economic and legal issues facing Lebanon.

As a Research, Advocacy, and Content Development associate at iHOPE, Walid contributes to the organization's mission of advancing child protection and family law in Lebanon and beyond. He brings a grounded legal perspective to his work, informed by his concurrent practice as a Paralegal at Ayouby Law Firm in Tripoli, North Lebanon. His research focuses on the intersection of law, policy, and child rights in conflict-affected contexts.