'When education is lost, the future vanishes': Gaza's Children and Educators on Two Years Deprived of School.

'We don’t want pity, we want action'.

A young student, twelve, a temporary shelter

It has been 24 months since I entered a real classroom. Two years since I listened to the morning bell at the institution I attended, sat at my desk and participated actively during my preferred subject. Sometimes I still vividly remember the familiar scents and noises: powder from the board, pencil shavings, joyful sounds in corridors. But my educational institution is gone; it was bombed shortly after the war began. My books were burned, and companions perished.

I was in the fifth year on 7 October: the final day I attended classes. That morning, air raid sirens sounded through the passageways. Some children cried, others held hands tightly. Our teacher tried to calm us, but even she sounded shaky. I remember longing for a routine day; teaching, intermission, a verse presentation. Instead, that day marked the end of my former reality.

Hostilities have claimed innumerable aspects. But the most painful deprivation of all is learning, because without it, our prospects disappear.

Now I dwell alongside my mother and father, siblings and female sibling in a crowded shelter in al-Mawasi. The temporary partitions flap in the wind, keeping neither cold nor heat away. We wait in line for water and food. Electricity is a dream and personal space is absent. Aspiration appears brittle.

At darkness, I look up at the night lights through the holes of my tent and question if my friends see the comparable vista. Some reach out when they manage, expressing they yearn for classes and have preserved their old notebooks; like relics of a vanished time. I feel ashamed because I’ve lost all of mine.

I once dreamed of becoming a teacher to help local youth learn, even when existence was challenging. Now I hope for being a writer – to compose, to speak and to reveal the world what it signifies to be a minor in Gaza. I want to narrate our accounts of fear and hunger, but also fortitude. Because even amid these conditions, amid death and ruins, our expressions persist.

When there’s some internet, I try to study online. Other times, I attend a small tent where helpers teach us mathematics and language. The instruction is limited – the power fails or the bombing resumes but in these instances, I experience vitality. I recall who I was: the young woman who cherished arithmetic and verse, who believed learning could change the world.

The war has taken so much; our residences, learning centers and relatives. I mourned my paternal relative, his spouse, and their offspring. I said goodbye to my cherished hometown, that southern city, which is nothing but rubble now. But the hardest loss of all is learning, because that is the loss of the future itself.

To the global audience, I state this: don’t let our dreams die. We seek no sympathy, we demand measures. Gaza’s children are entitled to books, schools and security. Education is not optional, it is a fundamental entitlement. This region is not just ruins; it is youth who persist in hoping under aerial surveillance at night. It is my story and I will persist in composing, even if all I have left is a fractured utensil and a fragment of ripped sheet.

'Students ask: "Teacher, are you safe?"'.

An educator, forty, teacher in a refugee camp

I have been teaching in Gaza for over ten years. Initially in Khan Younis, then in a different town, and now in this refugee settlement in the central Gaza Strip. In pre-conflict times, I regularly instructed six classes of about 40 students each, nearly 240 young minds enthusiastic about knowledge.

Teaching them was my mission and happiness in existence, and I still recollect the twinkle in a learner's look when a knowledge was acquired; the type of instance every teacher strives for.

I always believed education should be full of life. My learning environment was a space of amusement, aesthetics, and motion. We created cartographic art, acted out historical events, and turned lessons into stories.

Joy always permeated the space as curiosity substituted fear. Indeed, even before the war, local youth were always afraid. My learning environment was a place of safety but after the seventh, all was altered.

My educational institution became a shelter for households fleeing the bombs. Shortly after, it was struck and entirely ruined. There are very few schools still erect in this area now. For this period, nothing has been normal. The conflict has broken every facet of our reality: security, homes, educational centers, hopes. Apprehension and mourning are perpetual experiences.

Numerous of my learners are now lost – minors who spoke of dreaming of doctors, artists, and instructors. They were deprived even the right to exist. Those who remain live with malnutrition, relocation and fatigue – and yet, they still cling to the desire for education.

Sometimes, when the internet allows, I get in touch with a small number of them. They message questioning: “Are you safe, teacher?” We exchange short messages, abbreviated teaching, tiny sparks of connection amid the disorder. They ask if circumstances will ever go back to normal. I tell them I have no answer.

All over Gaza, teachers, aid workers and charities attempt instruction in all available spaces: in shelters, destroyed learning spaces, or packed refuges. Schooling has become an gesture of resistance, a way to declare: “We persist.” And provided that we persist in education, we will remain.

A significant number of us are also caregivers. I am a mother of {three|several