“French language is not useful for us, because we study English, and when you study English you will not need the French,” she said in an interview in Arabic. “With the Hebrew, it is a different language for people who live close to us. The Israelis used to come to Gaza and might come again in the future.”

Hebba Ayoub, who is 13, said her eighth-grade teacher encouraged the class to choose Hebrew, and most did. But not her. “I have a friend who speaks French, and I admire the language when I listen to her,” she said.

The Palestinian Authority does not teach Hebrew in its schools, and has no plans to do so. In Israel, Arabic has long been a staple of the curriculum: it is a compulsory subject in middle school, with about 350,000 students enrolled, officials said, and recently was introduced as an option in fifth and sixth grades, attracting 15,000. Among high schoolers, 10,000 are studying Arabic, according to the Education Ministry.

Here in Gaza, many adults speak some conversational Hebrew, learned decades ago on the job or more recently while serving time in Israeli prisons, but cannot read or write the language, officials said. While some see the classes as training for future spies, others have more practical, even mundane goals: to fill out paperwork for medical procedures done in Israel, to understand the news — and the cartoons — broadcast via satellite.

Both Arabic and Hebrew are Semitic languages that share as much as 40 percent of their grammar and word roots, experts say. The numbers and parts of the body sound similar — head is “ras” in Arabic, “rosh” in Hebrew — as do the words for right and left, and every day: kol yom. Both are written and read from right to left.

While Hebrew has not been taught in Gaza’s public schools since 1994, there have been a smattering of classes available for adults, though enrollment has dwindled from several thousand a year to a few hundred, according to Jamal al-Haddad, who heads the program. Government employees pay 50 shekels — about $12 — for three months of classes three times a week for two hours. (Others pay twice that.)

At one such class last week, a half-dozen students were reviewing for their final exam. They went over the names of languages themselves: ivrit (Hebrew), anglit (English), tzarfatit (French). The teacher asked where they were yesterday (“ba’avodah sheli,” at my work; “babayit,” at home). One woman in a hijab went to the chalkboard to write words in their masculine and feminine forms: “ish” and “isha” (man and woman); “tov” and “tovah” (good); “katav” and “katvah” (past tense for “write”).