Malala Yousafzai donates $50K to rebuild U.N. schools in Gaza

STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Oct. 29 (UPI) -- Nobel Peace Prize winner and Pakistani youth education activist Malala Yousafzai announced Wednesday she will donate $50,000 to rebuild United Nations schools in Gaza that were recently damaged by conflict.

"Innocent Palestinian children have suffered terribly and for too long," Yousafzai said Wednesday while accepting the World Children's Prize in Stockholm. She said she would donate the prize money to help the schools rebuild.

"This funding will help rebuild the 65 schools damaged during the recent conflict. Innocent Palestinian children have suffered terribly and for too long. We must all work to ensure Palestinian boys and girls, and all children everywhere, receive a quality education in a safe environment. Because without education, there will never be peace."

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which was established to help Palestinian refugees, expressed gratitude for Malala's donation.

UNRWA Commissioner-General Pierre Krähenbühl said that Malala's "Recognition... will lift the spirits of a million UNRWA students in Gaza and boost the morale of our more than 9,000 teaching staff there," noting that "Their suffering during the fighting was devastating." Her act of generosity "will do much to ease the pain of recent months."

Malala was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this month for her advocacy on behalf of equal education rights for girls "under the most dangerous circumstances." In 2012, at the age of 15, she was shot by the Taliban on her return home from school in the northwestern Swat District.