🔗 Share this article

'We don’t want pity, we want action'.

A young student, twelve, a temporary shelter

It has been two years since I stepped into a proper school. That long since I heard the start-of-class signal at the institution I attended, took my seat and raised my hand during my favourite class. At times I still clearly recall the auditory and olfactory sensations: chalk dust, wooden scraps, cheerful echoes. But my learning place was destroyed; it was targeted not long after the conflict started. My books were burned, and several classmates lost.

I was in fifth grade on that fateful day: the last day I went to school. That morning, alert signals screamed through the passageways. Some children cried, others held hands tightly. Our instructor sought to soothe, but even her tone wavered. I remember wishing for a normal day; instruction, intermission, a literary performance. Instead, that day marked the end of my previous existence.

The war has taken so much. But the most painful deprivation of all is education, because it represents the forfeiture of tomorrow.

Now I dwell alongside my parents, siblings and sister in a packed refuge in this coastal area. The shelter coverings sway with breezes, providing no climate control. We queue for nourishment and hydration. Electricity is a dream and seclusion is unavailable. Aspiration appears brittle.

At evening, I gaze toward the night lights through the openings of my tent and ponder if my peers see the identical heavens. Some contact me when they can, saying they long for education and have kept their old notebooks; like relics of a vanished time. I feel remorseful because I’ve misplaced all of mine.

I once envisioned pursuing pedagogy to assist local youth learn, even when existence was challenging. Now I hope for being a journalist – to write, to communicate 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 here, amid death and ruins, our voices refuse to be silent.

When there’s some internet, I attempt learning digitally. Sometimes, I visit a modest shelter where volunteers teach us arithmetic and Arabic. The sessions are brief – the power fails or the bombing resumes but in those moments, I feel alive. I recall who I was: the girl who loved numbers and poems, who believed education could transform society.

Hostilities have stolen countless aspects; our residences, educational institutions and relatives. I mourned my paternal relative, his spouse, and their children. I lost my cherished hometown, Rafah, which is nothing but rubble now. But the hardest loss of all is schooling, because without it, our prospects disappear.

To the world, I express this: don’t let our dreams die. We don’t want pity, we require steps. Gaza’s children deserve literature, schools and protection. Schooling is not a luxury, it is a essential privilege. Gaza is not only destruction; it is minors who still dream amid unmanned aircraft at evening. It is my narrative and I will continue writing, even if my only possessions is a broken pencil and a piece of torn paper.

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

An educator, 40, instructor in a refugee camp

I have been instructing in this area for over ten years. First in a southern city, then in another location, and currently in the central camp in the heart of the region. In pre-conflict times, I typically educated multiple groups of about fourty pupils per class, almost two hundred forty individuals keen on education.

Teaching them was my purpose and joy in life, and I still recollect the twinkle in a pupil's gaze when a concept was understood; the type of instance every teacher cherishes.

I always believed education should be full of life. My learning environment was a space of recreation, art, and movement. We designed geographical illustrations, performed past occurrences, and converted teaching into tales.

Merriment always occupied the area as curiosity replaced anxiety. Yes, even in earlier times, young residents were always frightened. My teaching space was a place of safety but after 7 October, all was altered.

My educational institution became a refuge for relatives running from the bombs. Soon, it was attacked and entirely ruined. There are hardly any learning institutions still erect in Gaza now. For this period, nothing has been normal. The hostilities has shattered every aspect of our reality: safety, homes, learning places, dreams. Apprehension and mourning are ever-present realities.

Numerous of my pupils are now lost – minors who spoke of dreaming of physicians, artists, and teachers. They were deprived even the entitlement to survival. Those who survive live with starvation, displacement and fatigue – and nevertheless, they still hold onto the will to learn.

At times, when the connectivity permits, I receive messages from a few of them. They write questioning: “Are you OK, instructor?” We exchange brief words, short lessons, small glimmers of contact amid the disorder. They inquire if circumstances will ever go back to normal. I inform them I don’t know.

Throughout Gaza, instructors, aid workers and charities endeavor education in all available spaces: in tents, ruined educational areas, or congested safe zones. Learning has become an act of defiance, a way to say: “We persist.” And provided that we persist in education, we will remain.

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