In Palestine, nine hundred classrooms are needed to be built every year to cope with the increase in population. Many schools were obligated to work on the double shift basis to solve the problem. The Ministry of Education (MOE), the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), and Private Sector are the three entities that provide educational facilities in Palestine. In most cases, the school building designs are standard prototypes that are not site-specific or

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... e-based. This resulted in thermal discomfort in educational spaces that lead many schools to install HVAC systems to maintain indoor comfort. School building designs are required to be more efficient climate-based and energyconscious while maintaining indoor comfort levels. Despite the presence of a Palestinian energy-efficiency building code since 2004, no energy benchmarks for buildings were specified. In order to develop energy-efficient school building designs in Gaza strip, an energy benchmark is needed to assess new designs. This study aims to develop an energy building dataset methodology in order to benchmark energy performance of Palestinian school buildings at an early stage of the design. The benchmarking methodology was based on field survey and simulation methods. Based on the survey, two school buildings representative of schools developed by MOE and UNRWA were selected and were used as reference buildings. Both were simulated for energy performance, delivering energy use intensity (EUI) for heating, cooling, and lighting. A virtual building database was created to test alternatives of building envelope parameters, classroom occupancy density and building orientation. An optimized best practice building was developed. Its EUI value was used as target values. The savings compared to reference buildings of MOE and UNRWA reached 28% and 35% respectively.