🔗 Share this article

'We don’t want pity, we want action'.

Juwayriya Adwan, twelve, a temporary shelter

For the past two years since I entered a proper school. That long since I listened to the school chime at my former school, took my seat and raised my hand during my preferred subject. Sometimes I still clearly recall the auditory and olfactory sensations: chalk dust, sharpener leftovers, joyful sounds in corridors. But my learning place was destroyed; it was targeted not long after the conflict started. My textbooks turned to ash, and companions perished.

I was in fifth grade on the seventh of October: the concluding day I attended classes. That beginning of the day, warning alarms screamed through the passageways. Some students wept, others gripped each other. Our instructor sought to soothe, but even her tone wavered. I remember hoping for a ordinary day; teaching, intermission, a verse presentation. Instead, that day marked the end of my former reality.

Hostilities have claimed innumerable aspects. But the toughest sacrifice of all is education, because it represents the forfeiture of tomorrow.

Now I live with my mother and father, two brothers and sister in a crowded shelter in this coastal area. The tent walls 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 wonder if my companions see the identical heavens. Some reach out when they can, stating they long for education and have retained their former exercise books; like valuables from a bygone era. I feel ashamed because I’ve lost all of mine.

I once aspired to entering the education field to assist young residents study, even when life was hard. Now I hope for being a writer – to compose, to talk and to show the world what it represents to be a minor in Gaza. I want to share our experiences of fear and hunger, but also fortitude. Because even here, amid loss and destruction, our voices refuse to be silent.

When online access exists, I try to study digitally. On other occasions, I go to a tiny space where volunteers educate us mathematics and language. The sessions are brief – the energy supply stops or the attacks recommence but in those moments, I experience vitality. I remember who I was: the girl who cherished arithmetic and verse, who believed education could transform society.

The war has taken so much; our dwellings, educational institutions and kin. I mourned my uncle, his partner, and their children. I lost my beloved urban area, my previous home, which is nothing but rubble now. But the most painful deprivation of all is education, because that is the loss of the future itself.

To the global audience, I express this: don’t let our dreams die. We seek no sympathy, we demand measures. The youth are entitled to books, schools and protection. Education is not a luxury, it is a essential privilege. The territory is not merely devastation; it is minors who still dream under aerial surveillance at darkness. It is my story and I will keep drafting, even if all I have left is a fractured utensil and a piece of torn paper.

'They message: "are you OK, teacher?"'.

Naglaa Weshah, 40, instructor in a refugee camp

I have been instructing in this area for over ten years. First in that urban area, then in Deir al-Balah, and currently in the central camp in the central Gaza Strip. In pre-conflict times, I used to teach several sets of about dozens of learners, almost two hundred forty individuals eager to learn.

Teaching them was my vocation and delight in reality, and I still recall the gleam in a learner's look when a knowledge was acquired; the type of instance every instructor cherishes.

I always was convinced instruction should be full of life. My learning environment was a space of recreation, creativity, and motion. We painted maps, acted out historical events, and converted teaching into tales.

Joy always filled the room as curiosity replaced fear. Yes, even prior to conflict, local youth were always frightened. My teaching space was a place of safety but after the seventh, the situation transformed.

My educational institution became a refuge for families escaping the explosives. Not long later, it was attacked and entirely ruined. There are almost no learning institutions left standing in this area now. For this period, everything has been abnormal. The hostilities has destroyed every facet of our lives: protection, residences, learning places, hopes. Anxiety and sorrow are perpetual experiences.

Many of my pupils are now lost – youth who spoke of becoming medical professionals, artists, and instructors. They were denied even the privilege of living. Those who survive live with hunger, displacement and exhaustion – and nevertheless, they still cling to the thirst for knowledge.

At times, when the online access enables, I get in touch with a few of them. They message asking: “Are you OK, educator?” We share concise phrases, abbreviated teaching, small glimmers of contact amid the chaos. They question if things will ever revert to standard. I inform them I don’t know.

Throughout this territory, teachers, volunteers and charities try to teach in all available spaces: in shelters, damaged classrooms, or congested safe zones. Learning has become an gesture of resistance, a way to say: “Our presence continues.” And so long as we continue learning, we will persist.

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