It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and the streets of Nablus are bustling. In the city center of one of the West Bank’s largest cities, men line the crowded sidewalks selling fruits, manakeesh flatbread, and an array of trinkets. Among the vendors is Talal Adabiq, a fifteen-year-old boy who is selling sweets and pomegranate juice. “I have been out of school for more than a year,” he says. “This way I can help my parents.” Looking around the market, it’s clear that he is far from alone: Dozens of school-aged children are perched on the sidewalk, running through the streets, or also manning nearby counters.
It is not a holiday, nor is this a case of mass truancy. This scene is the direct result of Israel’s chokehold on the Palestinian economy, leaving the education system in tatters. Hundreds of thousands of students across the West Bank are now in school only three days a week, and today is one of the mandatory two days off.
This problem arose when the government of Israel—which, on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (PA), collects income taxes from Palestinians employed in Israel, the West Bank, and settlements—began further withholding tax transfers to the PA after the war broke out in October 2023. This has led to a financial crisis in the West Bank—the territory administered by the PA—and forced the PA to slash public sector salaries. Since teachers are no longer receiving their full pay, public schools were cut to four days a week in 2024. When this academic year began in September, classes were further reduced to three.
For Aisha Khatib, principal of a public school in Nablus, the situation is dire. Her school can now only properly teach math, Arabic, and English, while other subjects including science get breezed over or skipped for the sake of time. “The teachers are so angry,” she says. During meetings with her, “they shout that they don’t have enough time to teach.”
Khatib has already noticed the consequences of this reduction, observing how students are unprepared for Tawjihi, the final Palestinian high school exam. Worried about her students’ academic future, she warns that “the right to education is under pressure and we are in danger of losing an entire generation."
Ten-year-old Zaid Hassaneh is part of this generation at risk. One of the top students in his class, he dreams of attending university abroad and becoming a doctor. In order to keep learning, he spends his off days teaching himself English with the help of Google Translate.
While parents scramble to fill the gaps in their children’s instruction, a feeling of hopelessness has begun to set in as this reduced schedule has become the status quo.
Zaid’s mother, Eman Hassaneh, does her best to help her son with homework, but notes that she alone cannot fill the void. “The teacher knows how to explain it much better than me,” she says.
Private schools, which have remained open five days a week, offer one alternative. But for most families, including Eman’s, they remain financially out of reach.
For teachers, this financial crunch is felt on two fronts. Providing proper education within these circumstances is nearly impossible, all while only receiving 60 percent of their pay.
Elementary school teacher Tamara Shtayeh has noticed a stark divide between her old full-time students and this part-time cohort. “This three-day solution is a bad one, as it does not even cover the bare minimum that students need,” she says, adding that the lack of routine has created problems for both students and parents alike.
To compensate for lost income, Shtayeh says she has begun selling products online during her days off. Khatib notes that for many, teaching is no longer financially viable, leading some to quit the profession and find jobs in factories. “They do not get enough salary and cannot give what they want to give to the students.”
The framework under which Israel collects and then redistributes taxes to the Palestinian Authority dates back to 1994. The deal, signed as part of the Oslo Accords, formalized a customs union between the economies of Israel and the PA, and was framed as a five-year transitional agreement. It granted Israel the authority to collect import duties on goods bound for the Palestinian market, as well as income taxes deducted from Palestinians employed in Israel, which were to be transferred to the PA on a monthly basis.
But over the past three decades, Israel has either partially deducted or withheld parts of this revenue on several occasions. Some of the most notable instances came during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, and again in 2006 after Hamas won the election in Gaza. In 2019, the remittance was deducted to offset payments made by the PA towards the families of Palestinians jailed or killed while attacking Israelis.
Prior to October 7, 2023, Israel’s newly formed far-right government already signalled its willingness to use taxation to leverage political pressure when it withheld $39 million in revenues after the PA asked the International Court of Justice to rule on the legality of Israel’s occupation.
But after the October 7 attacks, this policy escalated drastically. As it stands, the PA says it is owed more than 4 billion dollars.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has justified the decision in part by expressing concerns that the money could be used to fund Hamas. Critics, including a 2024 summit of leaders from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States (during Joe Biden’s presidency), have argued that this policy is meant to weaken the PA.
Regardless of the rationale, the policy has triggered a financial crisis. Compounding this is the revocation of work permits for more than 100,000 Palestinians in Israel, which has devastated both workers and the PA’s treasury.
On top of a shortened school week, many facets of the occupation further complicate life in the West Bank. Military raids, settler attacks, checkpoints, and demolition orders—which have long been a reality faced by those living under occupation—have reached unprecedented heights since the war broke out.
Military raids, in which the Israel Defense Forces descend on a village or town, have kept students out of school for days or even weeks. Nablus Governor Ghassan Daghlas says most recent operations often target schoolchildren, adding that “they take the child along with a parent and interrogate both for hours. In what psychological state do those students return?” In 2025, the city of Jenin experienced the longest military operation in the West Bank since the 2000s, which displaced thousands and wiped out weeks of schooling.
Settler violence adds to the chaos: Daghlas says three Nablus schools have been attacked in the past two months. This problem has gone on for years, with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reporting that settlers have long attempted to disrupt access to school, both by destroying infrastructure and harassing children on their way to class.
In 2025, a law banning the operations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) inside Israel forced the closure of six East Jerusalem schools. While the remainder of UNRWA schools—which serve nearly 46,000 Palestinian refugees in the West Bank—continue to operate, students have seen their education equally disrupted by military operations, settler violence and unpredictable checkpoints. PA figures warn that more than eighty schools serving 13,000 students now face full or partial demolition. Most of these schools are located in East Jerusalem and Area C, the administrative zone which comprises more than half of the West Bank, and falls under full Israeli control.
For Khatib, these conditions make academic continuation, let alone success, very difficult. She estimates that between 5 and 10 percent of her students have dropped out entirely, lamenting that once they’re gone, they rarely return.
Talal Adabiq embodies that loss. Unpredictable access to his school building, coupled with a desire to help his family earn money, drove the fifteen-year-old to quit school for good. Alone at his stand in the souk, or marketplace, he smiles while describing his job, at which he works six days per week and brings home between 40 and 50 shekels (12 to 15 U.S. dollars) per day. “With this, I can help my parents,” he says.
One would be remiss to ignore that a mere sixty miles away, the academic situation in Gaza is far worse. A bombing campaign that has targeted schools has left hundreds of thousands of students with no education at all.
“Not going to school,” Khatib warns, “and not living a normal life, this is destroying a nation.”