AMMAN — More than 410,000 school-age children have been pulled out of classrooms across five countries since the Iran war began in early March, UNICEF said Friday, warning that improvised arrangements in host communities from this Jordanian capital to the suburbs of Erbil were already buckling under the load and that an entire academic year was at risk of being written off for a generation of displaced families.

In a regional briefing delivered jointly from Amman and Geneva, UNICEF, the United Nations refugee agency and Save the Children put the breakdown at 168,000 displaced children inside Iraq, 94,000 in Jordan, 71,000 in Lebanon, roughly 60,000 in Iran itself who had moved between provinces, and an additional 18,000 documented in Turkey. The figures, which the agencies described as conservative, do not include children who remained in their home neighborhoods but had stopped attending school because of damaged buildings, fuel shortages or fear of strikes.

“We are looking at the largest education emergency the eastern Mediterranean has seen since the Syrian displacement of 2013, and it has arrived in five weeks rather than five years,” said Dominique Lemaire, UNICEF’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, speaking in Amman. “The host systems were already stretched. They are now improvising at a scale that improvisation cannot support.”

Jordanian Education Minister Azzam al-Tarawneh, appearing alongside Lemaire, said his ministry had authorized 230 public schools in Amman, Zarqa, Irbid and Mafraq to run double shifts beginning April 6, with Jordanian children attending in the morning and newly arrived Iraqi, Iranian and Lebanese children in the afternoon. Classroom sizes had ballooned past 45 in some afternoon shifts, he said, and the ministry would need at least $180 million in additional donor support through the summer to keep the system from collapsing back into a single shift.

“We have opened our doors and we will keep them open,” al-Tarawneh said. “But we cannot ask Jordanian taxpayers to absorb a regional war alone.”

The numbers translate, on the ground, into rented mosque courtyards, half-finished apartment blocks pressed into service and shipping containers retrofitted with whiteboards. In the eastern Amman neighborhood of Marka, a community center has been operating what its director called “an emergency primary school” for 340 children since March 18, staffed in part by Iraqi teachers among the displaced families.

“We have girls who have not been in a classroom for thirty-eight days,” said Lina Qasem, the director. “We have boys who watched their school in Baqubah hit by a missile. We are not equipped to give them an education. We are trying to give them a routine. That is all we can promise their parents right now.”

The Kurdistan Regional Government’s education ministry reported a parallel strain. In Erbil and Sulaimaniya, schools that had absorbed Iraqi displaced families from Anbar and Diyala in late March were now also taking in Iranian families crossing at Haji Omeran and Bashmaq. A KRG education official, Hawjin Salih, said 142 schools were running double shifts and that the region had requested $40 million from Baghdad and $60 million from international donors.

“Our teachers are working two jobs in one day, and we are paying them for one and a half,” Salih said. “We will not be able to sustain this past June without help.”

In Lebanon, where the public school system had already been crippled by years of fiscal crisis, the picture was bleaker. A senior Lebanese Education Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss internal planning, said only 38 percent of displaced Lebanese children who had moved north from the south during the late-March escalation were currently enrolled in any structured learning. The rest, he said, were “in apartments, in shelters, in cars, not in classrooms.”

Save the Children’s regional director, Aisha Mokhtar, said the organization had distributed 62,000 “education-in-emergencies kits” — bags containing notebooks, pencils, a slate and a small solar lamp — across the five countries since March 20, with demand outstripping supply at a rate the agency had not seen since the 2023 Sudan crisis. An additional 100,000 kits were being airlifted from Dubai, she said, but stocks beyond that were “not assured.”

The toll has been heaviest, aid workers said, on adolescent girls. UNHCR protection officer Renata Vasquez, based in Amman, said the agency had documented 18 cases of underage marriage among displaced families in Jordan in the past three weeks, a sharp uptick that protection teams attributed to economic stress and the collapse of school as a daily structure. “When the school day ends and there is nothing to come back to in the morning, the calculus inside families changes,” Vasquez said. “We have seen this pattern before. It accelerates fast.”

The education emergency has begun to register in the Islamabad talks, where mediators from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Qatar have been pushing toward a framework for a halt in hostilities. A senior Pakistani official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a sub-track on humanitarian deliverables had quietly added an “education continuity” annex committing signatories to protect school buildings from targeting and enable cross-border movement of accredited curricula and examination materials. The annex had been welcomed by Jordanian and Iraqi negotiators, the official said, but had not yet been formally tabled.

In Washington, a State Department spokesperson said the administration had released $85 million in supplemental education and child-protection funding through USAID earlier in the week, and that additional contributions were under consideration. Senior Democrats on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on state and foreign operations said the figure was “a down payment, not an answer,” and signaled that they would push for a larger supplemental tranche tied to the broader war response package.

Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst at the Levant Policy Forum, said the education collapse would outlast the war itself by years. “Children who lose a year do not simply pick up where they left off when the ceasefire is announced,” she said. “They lose the habit of school. They lose the cohort. Some of them lose the family economics that made school possible in the first place. This is the slow part of the war, and it has already started.”

UNICEF said it would convene an emergency pledging meeting in Geneva on April 17 and that a revised regional appeal of $620 million for education, child protection and psychosocial support would be issued in the coming days.