No school for Palestinian kids in Occupied Palestine

Thousands of Palestinian children in East Jerusalem do not attend school as there is no room for them in the state school system, parents and rights groups said, adding that the drop-out rate remained the highest in the Israeli school system.

"It is a disgraceful situation," said Abed al-Karim Lafi, head of the Union of East Jerusalem Parents' Committees.

According to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), there is a shortage of about 1,500 classrooms in East Jerusalem, which means only about half of all Palestinian children in the city attend state schools.

The rest - about 40,000 pupils – are in expensive private education or rely on various substandard forms of unofficial schooling.

To cope with the serious shortage of classrooms, the city came up with solutions such as "rented buildings, a double-shift system, mobile units and permission to operate unofficially recognised schools", according to a report by the Alternative Information Center, an Israeli-Palestinian NGO, in 2007.

These "solutions" mean students study at overcrowded private homes, sometimes without heating or in the open, and others have to wait until the second shift in the afternoon, leaving them on the streets in the morning. While the unofficial schools receive government funding they lack oversight, affecting the quality of education.

Some schools even lacked proper bathrooms, the AIC said.