‘We lost a generation’

As the skies fell quiet over Beirut this week, displaced Lebanese piled into cars and headed south for home, but any return to normality remains elusive given their economy was already in freefall even before war broke out last year and no solutions seem at hand.

A ceasefire between Israel and the Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah came into effect at dawn on Wednesday after conflict escalated in September with Israel launching heavy bombing raids across the country and sending troops into south Lebanon.

Although the fighting has stopped - at least for now - hard days lie ahead for a worn-out people who were already reeling from multiple crises since the economic implosion of 2019.

The crisis has hit education especially hard.

At least 500 public schools, roughly one in two in what is a badly under-funded sector, were converted into shelters in recent months to house many of the 1.2 million people fleeing the fighting, Save the Children said last month.

And 2024 marks the sixth straight year that Lebanon's 1.5 million children faced significant disruptions to schooling, worsening their long-term physical and mental outlook, it said.

Ameer Shweekh is one of those children. Forced to flee his home in the southern city of Tyre two months ago, the 13-year-old got a place at the Omar El Zeeny public school in a working-class neighbourhood in Beirut when the school year started this month.

Shweekh said he still logs onto online classes from his former school when he finishes his new studies each afternoon. But he knows he is falling behind, especially in coding - there are simply no computers at his new school.

The education community has only received 19 percent of the donor funding it needs this year, said Janhvi Kanoria, a director at Education Above All (EAA), a Qatar-based global education foundation.

"We have a lost generation in Lebanon," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview.