Inside the courtyard of the Gamal Abdel Nasser School in the Shajaiyah neighborhood east of Gaza City, students carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles and dressed in military fatigues take their positions for a demonstration — an attack on an Israeli military site represented by a makeshift watchtower flying the Israeli flag. A YouTube video shows a segment of the demonstration in which one of the boys hits the tower inside the school with an artillery shell to cheers of encouragement and cries of “Allahu akbar.”

The demonstration is part of a military training program for students that the Hamas Ministry of Education has been running since the beginning of the school year in Gaza. The program is a project to train 5,000 students, aged 15–17 from 65 schools, under the supervision of national security officers from the Ministry of Interior and the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas.

Mutassim Minawi, director of public relations at the Ministry of Education, said in an interview with Al-Monitor, “There is an urgent need to train the younger generation and physically equip them, given that we live under an Israeli occupation which is targeting adults and children.”