🔗 Share this article

'We seek action, not sympathy'.

A young student, 12, al-Mawasi

For the past two years since I entered a learning environment. Two years since I heard the morning bell at my former school, occupied my place and answered questions during my preferred subject. Sometimes I still distinctly recollect the sounds and smells: powder from the board, sharpener leftovers, cheerful echoes. But my school no longer exists; it was bombed soon after the hostilities erupted. My learning materials incinerated, and several classmates lost.

I was in the fifth year on that fateful day: the last day I entered the school building. That beginning of the day, alert signals blared through the corridors. Some students wept, others clasped palms firmly. Our educator attempted reassurance, but even she sounded shaky. I remember wishing for a normal day; teaching, break time, a poem recital. Instead, that day became the last page of my old life.

Conflict has stolen countless things. But the hardest loss of all is schooling, because without it, our prospects disappear.

Now I dwell alongside my mother and father, two brothers and female sibling in a crowded shelter in this coastal area. The tent walls flap in the wind, keeping neither cold nor heat away. We queue for sustenance and drinks. Energy access is fantasy and personal space is absent. Aspiration appears brittle.

At night, I look up at the stars through the openings of my tent and wonder if my companions see the identical heavens. Some reach out when they are able, saying they yearn for classes and have kept their previous journals; like relics of a vanished time. I feel ashamed because I’ve misplaced all of mine.

I once aspired to entering the education field to assist Gaza’s children acquire knowledge, even when circumstances were difficult. Now I dream of being a reporter – to draft, to speak and to reveal the world what it represents to be a minor in this region. I want to share our experiences of fear and hunger, but also bravery. Because even here, amid loss and destruction, our voices refuse to be silent.

When connectivity is available, I endeavor to educate myself via the web. On other occasions, I go to a small tent where volunteers teach us math and Arabic. The sessions are brief – the electricity cuts out or the bombing resumes but in these instances, I feel alive. I recollect who I was: the student who adored mathematics and poetry, who was convinced knowledge could alter reality.

The war has taken so much; our homes, educational institutions and relatives. I mourned my family member, his partner, and their young ones. I forfeited my cherished hometown, Rafah, which is nothing but rubble now. But the toughest sacrifice of all is education, because it represents the forfeiture of tomorrow.

To the world, I say this: keep our hopes alive. We seek no sympathy, we demand measures. Gaza’s children deserve books, educational facilities and safety. Learning is not an extravagance, it is a fundamental entitlement. Gaza is not only destruction; it is minors who continue to aspire amid unmanned aircraft at darkness. It is my narrative and I will persist in composing, even if the sole items remaining is a fractured utensil and a fragment of ripped sheet.

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

Naglaa Weshah, forty, instructor in al-Bureij camp

I have been instructing in the region for more than a decade. First in Khan Younis, then in a different town, and currently in this refugee settlement in the central Gaza Strip. Prior to hostilities, I used to teach six classes of about dozens of learners, nearly 240 young minds enthusiastic about knowledge.

Educating them was my mission and happiness in reality, and I still remember the sparkle in a learner's look when a concept was understood; the type of instance every teacher cherishes.

I always believed instruction should be vibrant. My teaching space was a area of recreation, aesthetics, and activity. We painted maps, acted out historical events, and converted teaching into tales.

Joy always filled the room as curiosity displaced fear. Indeed, even before the war, young residents were always frightened. My learning environment was a place of safety but after that day, the situation transformed.

My learning center became a safe haven for relatives escaping the bombs. Soon, it was attacked and totally demolished. There are very few educational facilities left standing in Gaza now. For this period, nothing has been normal. The war has shattered every facet of our reality: safety, dwellings, learning places, aspirations. Fear and grief are perpetual experiences.

A significant number of my learners are now dead – youth who mentioned aspiring to be doctors, painters, and instructors. They were denied even the entitlement to survival. Those who remain experience starvation, relocation and exhaustion – and however, they still cling to the desire for education.

Occasionally, when the online access permits, I receive messages from a handful of them. They write asking: “Are you safe, educator?” We communicate brief words, short lessons, tiny sparks of interaction amid the turmoil. They inquire if things will ever go back to normal. I inform them I don’t know.

Across this territory, teachers, volunteers and charities endeavor education wherever possible: in temporary structures, damaged classrooms, or crowded shelters. Schooling has become an act of defiance, a way to declare: “We persist.” And as long as we continue learning, we will endure.

Many of us are also guardians. I am a guardian of {three|several