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'We don’t want pity, we want action'.

A young student, 12, al-Mawasi

It has been two years since I stepped into a real classroom. That long since I listened to the school chime at my former school, sat at my desk and participated actively during my preferred subject. Occasionally I still distinctly recollect the sounds and smells: chalk dust, sharpener leftovers, cheerful echoes. But my learning place was destroyed; it was targeted shortly after the hostilities erupted. My learning materials incinerated, and some of my friends killed.

I was in fifth grade on that fateful day: the concluding day I entered the school building. That beginning of the day, alert signals sounded through the halls. Some pupils sobbed, others clasped palms firmly. Our teacher tried to calm us, but even her voice trembled. I remember longing for a ordinary day; teaching, recess, a poem recital. Instead, that day signaled the conclusion of my old life.

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

Now I reside with my mother and father, siblings and female sibling in a congested safe space in Khan Younis. The shelter coverings move with air currents, keeping neither cold nor heat away. We queue for sustenance and drinks. Electricity is a dream and privacy doesn’t exist. Hope feels fragile.

At evening, I look up at the night lights through the holes of my shelter and question if my companions see the same sky. Some reach out when they manage, saying they long for education and have preserved their former exercise books; like relics of a vanished time. I feel ashamed because I’ve lost all of mine.

I once aspired to becoming a teacher to help Gaza’s children study, even when life was hard. Now I aim for being a journalist – to draft, to speak and to reveal the world what it signifies to be a minor in the Strip. I want to narrate our accounts of anxiety and deprivation, but also courage. Because even here, amid death and ruins, our expressions persist.

When there’s some internet, I try to study via the web. Sometimes, I visit a tiny space where aid workers teach us arithmetic and Arabic. The instruction is limited – the energy supply stops or the airstrikes begin again but in those moments, I feel alive. I recollect who I was: the young woman who loved numbers and poems, who thought knowledge could alter reality.

The war has taken so much; our dwellings, educational institutions and families. I mourned my uncle, his spouse, and their young ones. I forfeited my beautiful city, my previous home, which is nothing but rubble now. But the most painful deprivation of all is learning, because without it, our prospects disappear.

To the world, I say this: preserve our aspirations. We seek no sympathy, we demand measures. Young residents are entitled to texts, educational facilities and security. Learning is not a luxury, it is a essential privilege. The territory is not only destruction; it is minors who persist in hoping under aerial surveillance at night. It is my story and I will keep drafting, even if all I have left is a damaged writing tool and a piece of torn paper.

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

An educator, forty, teacher in a refugee camp

I have been instructing in the region for a substantial period. Initially in that urban area, then in another location, and now in this refugee settlement in the central Gaza Strip. Prior to hostilities, I typically educated six classes of about 40 students each, almost two hundred forty individuals enthusiastic about knowledge.

Teaching them was my purpose and joy in existence, and I still recall the gleam in a learner's look when a knowledge was acquired; the kind of moment every teacher cherishes.

I always believed education should be vibrant. My teaching space was a space of amusement, art, and activity. We painted maps, performed past occurrences, and turned lessons into stories.

Merriment always permeated the space as interest substituted fear. Indeed, even in earlier times, children in Gaza were always afraid. My teaching space was a secure location but after the seventh, everything changed.

My school became a safe haven for relatives escaping the bombs. Shortly after, it was attacked and completely destroyed. There are very few learning institutions remaining intact in Gaza now. For two years, everything has been abnormal. The hostilities has shattered every part of our existence: safety, homes, learning places, aspirations. Apprehension and mourning are ever-present realities.

Numerous of my pupils are now lost – youth who talked about dreaming of medical professionals, artists, and instructors. They were deprived even the right to exist. Those who remain live with hunger, eviction and fatigue – and nevertheless, they still cling to the thirst for knowledge.

Occasionally, when the internet allows, I receive messages from a few of them. They message inquiring: “How are you, instructor?” We communicate brief words, abbreviated teaching, tiny sparks of connection amid the chaos. They inquire if circumstances will ever go back to normal. I tell them I don’t know.

Across Gaza, educators, aid workers and charities attempt instruction in all available spaces: in temporary structures, damaged classrooms, or packed refuges. Learning has become an gesture of resistance, a way to say: “We are still here.” And so long as we keep acquiring knowledge, we will remain.

Numerous of us are also parents. I am a mother of {three|several