The last time Faida Pierre, 10, went to school, her mother found her stranded on the roof of the school’s building, barefoot and crying, while a gang stormed the surrounding downtown Port-au-Prince neighborhood.

The principal and teachers had called parents to pick up their children as the sound of gunfire grew louder and armed men approached. Then everyone ran for their lives. Faida ended up alone.

“There was a panic,” Faida recalled, “and people were running out of the building. People were saying that the bandits had attacked the neighborhood, so kids were trying to reach the rooftop.”

That was a year ago, and, like some 300,000 other children across Haiti, Faida, who was in third grade, stopped going to school.

Robbed of their education and their prospects for the future, legions of Haitian children are the overlooked victims of the gang violence that has crippled the country: homeless, hungry and often targeted for recruitment by the armed groups they fled.

Many schools remain shuttered because they are in gang-occupied areas. Others have become de facto shelters, as more than one million people — roughly 10 percent of the country’s population — have abandoned their homes during gang takeovers of their communities.

After a surge of violence crippled Port-au-Prince, the capital, last February, nearly 15,000 households descended on government and school buildings for protection, according to UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s advocacy organization, which has also tracked the number of children not attending school.

Even families whose schools remained open said they had not been able to enroll their children because they lacked money for school fees, uniforms and supplies. Most children in Haiti attend private schools, but public schools also charge modest fees that many families whose homes and businesses were burned to the ground can no longer afford.

At the same time, tens of thousands of children have abandoned Port-au-Prince for safer places elsewhere in Haiti, overwhelming schools in several communities.

Schools have also had to cope with a plunge in the numbers of teachers and staff, many of whom either were killed or left the country. Haiti’s schools have lost about one-fourth of their teachers, according to government officials.

Besides educational losses, being out of school makes them vulnerable to joining the very armed groups wreaking havoc on their lives. Experts estimate that up to half of gang members are minors.

In the province that includes Port-au-Prince, 77,000 ninth graders showed up for the statewide final exam at the end of the 2023-24 school year, a drop of 10,000 from the previous year, the Education Ministry said. As a result, officials estimate that some 130,000 students in the capital region withdrew from the school system’s 13 grades last academic year.

Officials said they had been unable to make a full assessment of how many students dropped out this year.

Faida may not go to school, but she lives in one. Faida’s father was killed in a gang attack, her mother said, so she and Faida joined the nearly 5,000 people living at the Lycée Marie Jeanne school in Port-au-Prince.

When a New York Times reporter and photographer visited the school in the fall, Faida and her mother, Faroline Parice, were sleeping outdoors in a courtyard awash in mosquitoes and rainwater.

“At night, sometimes she wakes up, and she’s crying,” Ms. Parice said. “She asks when she will go back to school.”

Wudley Beauge, 17, and his 15-year-old sister, Sadora Damus, were also there and have missed more than a year of school.

Sadora dreams of becoming a police chief, but would need to pass the ninth-grade exams to enter the police academy, and she left school after eighth grade. Wudley, who missed 10th grade, wants to be an auto mechanic.

They sleep on a classroom floor with about a dozen other people.

“My first priority would be to go back to school because when I’m sharing my goals with people who are older than I am, they say, ‘If you want to be a mechanic, you must go back to school,’” Wudley said. “My family doesn’t have money to send me to mechanic school.”

His mother, Soirilia Elpenord, 38, wants her children in school, but with her cosmetics shop and home set ablaze by gang members, the mother of four said finding shelter ranked higher than learning.

“School? That’s not a priority,” she said. “My priority is to survive. The main priority for all parents in Haiti right now is how to survive.”

UNICEF has worked with the Haitian government to provide cash assistance to needy families, but prioritizes those whose children are enrolled in school, and many parents said they did not qualify for aid.

Bruno Maes, who recently left as head of UNICEF in Haiti, acknowledged that there was not enough funding to help all families, but said that more children would drop out of school without assistance.

The education situation was complicated by the more than 100,000 students, primarily from the capital, who moved to the south, where life is relatively calm.

But schools had no seats for them. Many students fled with only the clothing on their backs and showed up without birth certificates, school transcripts or any other documentation proving what grade they were in.

“You have a lack of documents, you have the impact of the violence obliging them to flee, and then you have no seat in schools, and then you have no money and cannot pay,” Mr. Maes said. “The scope of the issues affecting the majority of children is huge.”

The stakes are high: UNICEF said the number of children recruited by gangs last year increased by 70 percent. It is common to see 7-year-olds working as gang lookouts, experts say.

Janine Morna, who researches children in armed conflict for Amnesty International, said young gang members in Haiti whom she had interviewed for an upcoming report told her they had joined either under threat or out of financial desperation. The gangs often provide either a small monthly payment or allow younger members to keep the change after running errands, she said.

None of the minors she interviewed were in school.

“We know schools can prevent recruitment by keeping children active and engaged,” Ms. Morna said. “Children we spoke to were left idle — sometimes they were confined to their homes or displacement sites without the opportunity for enrichment and play.”

“The prospect of joining a gang,” she added, “becomes more attractive the longer you are out of school.”

Haitian officials said they were committed to improving the education system as a key step in stabilizing the country. The goal is to make schools more affordable by ensuring that early grades are free and providing families with stipends and books.

The government also rented buildings to accommodate students whose schools had become de facto shelters.

“Haiti has invested a lot in education,” said the country’s education minister, Augustin Antoine.

Some schools in the West Department, which includes Port-au-Prince, reopened in the fall, but with fewer students, said Etienne Louisseul France, the Education Ministry official who oversees schools in that region.

Haiti has been in turmoil since 2021, when its last elected president was assassinated. Last year, gangs banded together in coordinated attacks on police stations, hospitals and entire neighborhoods. With its police department depleted — many officers took advantage of U.S. humanitarian parole visas — the government has struggled to contain the violence.

The Port-au-Prince airport has been closed since November after gang members shot at U.S. commercial aircraft. An international force, financed by the Biden administration and made up mostly of Kenyan police officers, has done little to loosen the gangs’ grip on the capital.

The U.N. said at least 5,600 people were killed in 2024, up nearly 25 percent from the year before.

“Now the situation is that many schools had to shut down, even private schools,” Mr. France said, adding that officials have to “think of a Plan B.”

Ms. Elpenord’s backup plan is to eventually send her son to live with family away from their neighborhood so he can attend school. Her daughter tried going back to school a few weeks ago, but gang skirmishes kept her out.

“I feel this is destroying me,” said her son, Wudley, who is still hoping to start 10th grade. “And it makes me sad.”

André Paultre contributed reporting from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

The Israeli Army lookouts were monitoring Hamas in Gaza across a security fence from a base in southern Israel. As it turned out, Hamas was also watching them.

The four women released by Hamas on Saturday after more than 15 months in captivity in Gaza are “spotters” for the army who were stationed in a small military base about a half-mile from the border.

In the first minutes of the Hamas-led dawn assault on Oct. 7, 2023, gunmen burst through the fence and overran the base, Nahal Oz. Dozens of soldiers were killed, including 15 spotters. The gunmen also dragged seven lookouts — unarmed female conscripts in their late teens — onto trucks and drove them into Gaza. Some were still in their pajamas, some bloodied from wounds.

One of them, Pvt. Ori Megidish, 19, was rescued three weeks later by Israeli forces. Another, Cpl. Noa Marciano, 19, was injured in an Israeli airstrike and then killed by militants inside Gaza’s Shifa hospital, according to the military. Hamas said she died in the bombing.

Four of the remaining five, Naama Levy, Karina Ariev and Daniella Gilboa, who are now all 20, and Liri Albag, 19, were released on Saturday as part of a cease-fire deal providing for the release of scores of Palestinian prisoners, many of them convicted of killing Israelis. A fifth spotter, Agam Berger, is slated to be released in the coming days or weeks under that deal, which came into effect on Jan. 19.

Ms. Levy, Ms. Berger and Ms. Albag were recent recruits who had arrived at the base less than two days before the attack. The Israeli military has not disclosed the rank of the captured soldiers.

The capture of the lookouts underscored what many Israelis view as the worst military, intelligence and governmental debacle in their country’s history. Their families are still waiting for a formal investigation into the fall of Nahal Oz.

Relatives and former lookouts said the women were on constant alert for the possibility of a cross-border raid, though they did not envisage anything on the scale of the one that happened.

“All the time, they told us there’d be a raid,” said Amit Yerushalmi, 22, a former lookout who served at the Nahal Oz base from December 2021 until about a week before the assault. But she said they had expected a localized event along the fence, like an attempt to abduct a couple of soldiers.

“We would joke about whose shift the raid would fall on,” Ms. Yerushalmi said.

In the months leading up to the assault, Ms. Yerushalmi said, there were growing signs of something afoot. She said the spotters saw convoys of 20 to 30 white pickup trucks filled with Hamas fighters driving along the border with increasing frequency, stopping occasionally and peering into Israel through binoculars. They would also put up drones a few times a day, Ms. Yerushalmi said.

The spotters reported the activity, she and several relatives of the other lookouts said, but were told by their superiors that their job was to be the eyes, not the brains, of the Israeli military. Their reports, they said, appeared to have been dismissed.

The Israeli military declined to comment on the specific claims, but said in a statement that it was “reviewing the events of October 7 and what preceded them” with the goal of deriving lessons for the continuation of the army’s operations.

When the attack came, thousands of Hamas-led gunmen and marauders burst through the fence and overran military bases, border villages and towns, as well as a music festival. About 1,200 people were killed in Israel that day, and another 250 were taken as hostages into Gaza, according to the Israeli authorities. The assault set off a 15-month war that has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians, Gaza health authorities say, and has left much of the coastal enclave in ruins.

It took hours for any backup forces to arrive at Nahal Oz. The lookouts’ commanders were at a different base, farther from the border.

“I still don’t know what really happened there,” said Eyal Eshel, the father of Sgt. Roni Eshel, one of the 15 lookout soldiers killed at Nahal Oz. Mr. Eshel conducted his own research into the events and is pressing for a formal inquiry into the failures on that day.

“I understood one thing,” Mr. Eshel said of the research he had done on the fate of the spotters. “Their abandonment and the disdain for them was so great.”

The evening before the raid, the lookouts were in a festive mood, sharing a sabbath meal together, singing and saying goodbye to a team member, Staff Sgt. Shahaf Nissani, 20, who was completing her mandatory service. Her mother had delivered food to the base.

The lookouts worked four-hour shifts, with eight hours’ rest in between. They were trained to never take their eyes off the screens in the operations room.

Karina Ariev’s family was not overly worried when she was assigned to Nahal Oz, said her cousin Anna Astmaker. “This was within the borders of the country,” she said. But Ms. Ariev told them she did not feel safe there, her cousin said.

Ms. Ariev, the daughter of immigrants from Ukraine, was on duty from midnight until 4 a.m. early on Oct. 7. Sergeant Eshel was part of another group that took over at 4 a.m.

At 6:29 a.m., militants fired a barrage of rockets out of Gaza, providing a smoke screen as exploding drones knocked out key communications and surveillance towers.

As sirens warned of incoming rocket fire, the off-duty lookouts ran from their sleeping quarters to an aboveground shelter.

Within minutes, waves of Hamas commandos had burst through Israel’s vaunted defenses, some in white pickup trucks, and the base was quickly overrun.

In the operations room, Sergeant Eshel was using codewords to report the raid as it unfolded in a voice rising with urgency, according to an audio recording released by the military. Then the cameras were destroyed, and the monitoring screens went blank.

Dozens of armed soldiers who were stationed at the base on a rotation fought to their last bullets. The assailants shot and threw grenades into the shelter where the lookouts were hiding, killing and injuring many of them.

Ms. Ariev called her parents from the shelter to say goodbye, according to Ms. Astmaker. She told them to continue to live if she did not survive, and continued texting with them until 7:20 a.m., when all contact was lost.

Footage soon emerged on social media of Ms. Ariev and other lookouts being taken to Gaza.

There has been scant information about them since. Ms. Ariev appeared in a hostage video a year ago with Ms. Gilboa and Doron Steinbrecher, one of three women released on Jan. 19.

Ms. Albag appeared this month in the most recent hostage video released by Hamas, which analysts said was probably intended to put pressure on Israel for a cease-fire deal.

The surveillance soldiers who were in the operations room at the time of the assault were alive for nearly six hours until midday, waiting to be rescued, according to information gathered by Mr. Eshel and testimony given last year to an informal inquiry that he initiated with other bereaved families and survivors of the assault.

In a battle around the operations room, four combat soldiers fought to their deaths, the inquiry found. The assailants then set the operations room ablaze. Seven more combat soldiers and only one of the lookouts managed to find their way through the thick smoke and escape through a small bathroom window. Sergeant Eshel and the others on duty died in the inferno.

Only one other lookout escaped alive from the shelter. In all, more than 50 soldiers were killed in the Nahal Oz base, 15 of them lookouts.

Sergeant Eshel was classified as missing for 34 days until the military confirmed her death, based on DNA. But, Mr. Eshel said, “There are a lot of open questions.”

Israel’s military chief, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, announced his resignation this past week and said that before he departs, in March, the military would finalize the series of long-awaited internal inquiries into its failure on Oct. 7. The results of the internal inquiries will be made available to the public, the military says.

Mr. Eshel believes his daughter knew she would not make it out alive. The oldest of three siblings, she always signed off her messages with five red heart emojis, one for each member of the family, he said. In her last message to her mother from the operations room, at 9:27 a.m., she said not to worry and signed off with only four hearts.

Israel told the United Nations on Friday that its relief agency known as UNRWA, a critical lifeline to two million Palestinians during the 15 months of war in Gaza, had six days to stop all operations in East Jerusalem.

Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danon, said in a letter addressed to the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, “UNRWA is required to cease its operations in Jerusalem and evacuate all premises in which it operates in the city, no later than 30 January 2025.”

The letter was Israel’s first official notice to the U.N. about how it planned to enforce legislation passed by the Israeli Parliament in October banning UNRWA, known formally as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, from operating in Israeli territory. The measure also prohibited Israeli officials from engaging with officials and employees of UNRWA.

The move came after months of tensions between the Israeli government and the U.N. agency, which provides food, shelter, health care, vocational training and education to Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza, especially in the aftermath of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel that set off the war. The agency also aids Palestinians who live in neighboring countries like Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, where Palestinians displaced in the founding of Israel have lived for decades.

Israel has accused UNRWA of being infiltrated by members of Hamas. But two U.N. investigations found that fewer than 10 employees out of nearly 13,000 were affiliated with the armed Palestinian group, and they were fired.

Two hundred and sixty-nine of UNRWA’s staff members have been killed in Gaza — the largest loss of life among U.N. employees in any conflict, officials say.

Mr. Danon said in the letter that Israel would continue to cooperate with the U.N. and “any of its agencies that have not been infiltrated by terror organizations.”

Asked for comment, Farhan Haq, a U.N. spokesman, referred to previous statements by Mr. Guterres fiercely defending the work of UNRWA as irreplaceable and essential, particularly in Gaza, where Israeli bombardment to root out Hamas has displaced most of the population and killed about 47,000 people, according to Gazan officials, who do no distinguish between civilians and combatants.

A spokeswoman for UNRWA also referred requests for comments to Mr. Guterres’s office, since the letter was addressed to him.

Mr. Guterres told a meeting of the U.N. Security Council earlier this week on the situation in Gaza, “First, United Nations entities — including the backbone of our humanitarian response, UNRWA — must be able to perform their functions without hindrance.”

UNRWA’s chief, Philippe Lazzarini, also asked the Council last week to intervene to stop Israel from enforcing the legislation outlawing his agency. He said such actions “will massively weaken the international humanitarian response” in Gaza and “immeasurably worsen already catastrophic living conditions.”

Before the letter was sent, Mr. Lazzarini told reporters last Friday that his agency had received no clear directive from Israel on how the measures would be carried out. He also said that he expected UNRWA to continue its work, albeit with enormous logistical challenges in the West Bank and Gaza, and that its work in Jerusalem would be compromised.

In the letter, Israel demanded that UNRWA evacuate two sites in the Maalot Dafna and Kfar Aqueb neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, which is considered by international law to be part of the West Bank and under occupation. Israel considers all of Jerusalem to be part of Israel.

UNRWA was established in 1949 to assist Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

The agency has widespread support among U.N. member states, and they have urged Israel not to ban the agency’s work. After Israel accused Hamas of infiltrating the agency, the Biden administration suspended millions in annual funding to UNRWA, and Congress in March prohibited U.S. funding to the organization for a year.

During his first presidential term, Donald J. Trump withdrew funding for UNRWA in 2018, and he is expected to continue restricting funding.

Mr. Trump’s pick to be U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Representative Elise Stefanik, criticized the relief agency as “antisemitic” in her Senate hearing this week, and said she supported Israel’s “biblical rights” over the West Bank.

That position is at odds with the U.N.’s stance that the West Bank is occupied Palestinian territory.

Mr. Lazzarini said in a post on X on Friday that preventing UNRWA from operating “might sabotage” the provisional cease-fire recently struck between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, “failing once again hopes of people who have gone through unspeakable suffering.”

He said that, in the first three days of the truce, UNRWA brought in food for one million people in Gaza and had already distributed it to about 3,000 people in northern Gaza, where the U.N. and aid agencies have warned that people were at the brink of famine.

“The work of UNRWA must continue in Gaza + across the occupied Palestinian territory,” Mr. Lazzarini said.