🔗 Share this article

'We seek action, not sympathy'.

A young student, 12, Khan Younis

It has been two years since I was last inside a learning environment. That long since I heard the school chime at Khawla Bint al-Azwar school, took my seat and raised my hand during my favourite class. Occasionally I still distinctly recollect the auditory and olfactory sensations: chalk dust, pencil shavings, joyful sounds in corridors. But my learning place was destroyed; it was bombed soon after the hostilities erupted. My textbooks turned to ash, and several classmates lost.

I was in the fifth year on that fateful day: the final day I went to school. That early hours, air raid sirens blared through the corridors. Some pupils sobbed, others gripped each other. Our teacher tried to calm us, but even her voice trembled. I remember longing for a ordinary day; instruction, recess, a verse presentation. Instead, that day signaled the conclusion of my previous existence.

The war has taken so much. But the most painful deprivation of all is education, because without it, our prospects disappear.

Now I dwell alongside my parents, two brothers and female sibling in a crowded shelter in al-Mawasi. The temporary partitions sway with breezes, failing to insulate. We wait in line for water and food. Power is imaginary and privacy doesn’t exist. Aspiration appears brittle.

At evening, I look up at the night lights through the gaps of my tent and ponder if my companions see the identical heavens. Some message me when they manage, expressing they long for education and have preserved their former exercise books; like treasures from a lost world. I feel remorseful because I’ve lost all of mine.

I once envisioned becoming a teacher to help local youth study, even when circumstances were difficult. Now I aim for being a journalist – to write, to communicate and to show the world what it signifies to be a child in Gaza. I want to share our experiences of anxiety and deprivation, but also fortitude. Because even in this place, amid loss and destruction, our words continue.

When there’s some internet, I attempt learning digitally. Sometimes, I visit a small tent where helpers teach us math and Arabic. The lessons are short – the power fails or the airstrikes begin again but in these instances, I experience vitality. I recollect who I was: the student who loved numbers and poems, who believed education could transform society.

Hostilities have stolen countless aspects; our dwellings, educational institutions and families. I lost my paternal relative, his wife, and their offspring. I lost my cherished hometown, that southern city, which is nothing but rubble now. But the most painful deprivation of all is schooling, because it represents the forfeiture of tomorrow.

To the global audience, I express this: preserve our aspirations. Compassion isn't enough, we demand measures. Young residents merit texts, schools and security. Schooling is not optional, it is a basic right. Gaza is not only destruction; it is youth who persist in hoping beneath the drones at evening. It is my story and I will persist in composing, even if my only possessions is a broken pencil and a scrap of damaged material.

'Pupils inquire: "Are you alright, educator?"'.

Naglaa Weshah, 40, instructor in al-Bureij camp

I have been teaching in this area for a substantial period. Initially in a southern city, then in a different town, and now in the central camp in the middle of the territory. In pre-conflict times, I typically educated multiple groups of about 40 students each, hundreds of eager students keen on education.

Educating them was my purpose and joy in existence, and I still recollect the twinkle in a pupil's gaze when a new idea clicked; the sort of occasion every instructor strives for.

I always believed learning should be full of life. My classroom was a zone of play, creativity, and motion. We created cartographic art, acted out historical events, and converted teaching into tales.

Laughter always permeated the space as interest substituted anxiety. Certainly, even in earlier times, children in Gaza were always scared. My teaching space was a protected zone but after 7 October, all was altered.

My school became a refuge for relatives escaping the aerial attacks. Soon, it was targeted and entirely ruined. There are hardly any educational facilities remaining intact in Gaza now. For 24 months, everything has been abnormal. The conflict has broken every part of our lives: security, dwellings, schools, hopes. Apprehension and mourning are ever-present realities.

A significant number of my learners are now dead – youth who spoke of dreaming of doctors, artists, and educators. They were denied even the right to exist. Those who remain experience hunger, relocation and exhaustion – and yet, they still cling to the desire for education.

Sometimes, when the online access allows, I receive messages from a small number of them. They message asking: “Are you safe, teacher?” We share short messages, abbreviated teaching, small glimmers of contact amid the turmoil. They inquire if circumstances will ever revert to standard. I inform them I don’t know.

Throughout the region, instructors, aid workers and organizations try to teach in any feasible location: in tents, destroyed learning spaces, or congested safe zones. Schooling has become an demonstration of perseverance, a way to express: “Our presence continues.” And provided that we persist in education, we will endure.

A significant number of us are also guardians. I am a parent of {three|several