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'We seek action, not sympathy'.

A young student, twelve, Khan Younis

It has been 24 months since I was last inside a real classroom. That long since I heard the start-of-class signal at Khawla Bint al-Azwar school, took my seat and raised my hand during my beloved lesson. Occasionally I still clearly recall the auditory and olfactory sensations: powder from the board, pencil shavings, laughter echoing down the halls. But my learning place was destroyed; it was struck shortly after the war began. My books were burned, and several classmates lost.

I was in the fifth year on that fateful day: the last day I attended classes. That beginning of the day, air raid sirens blared through the corridors. Some students wept, others clasped palms firmly. Our instructor sought to soothe, but even she sounded shaky. I remember hoping for a normal day; instruction, recess, a poem recital. Instead, that day became the last page of my former reality.

The war has taken so much. But the most painful deprivation of all is education, because that is the loss of the future itself.

Now I dwell alongside my guardians, siblings and female sibling in a crowded shelter in Khan Younis. The temporary partitions flap in the wind, failing to insulate. We queue for water and food. Energy access is fantasy and privacy doesn’t exist. Optimism seems delicate.

At evening, I gaze toward the stars through the openings of my shelter and question if my friends see the same sky. Some message me when they manage, saying they miss school and have preserved their previous journals; like valuables from a bygone era. I feel remorseful because I’ve lost all of mine.

I once envisioned entering the education field to assist young residents study, even when life was hard. Now I aim for being a writer – to write, to speak and to demonstrate the world what it means to be a minor in Gaza. I want to narrate our accounts of anxiety and deprivation, but also courage. Because even here, amid death and ruins, our words continue.

When online access exists, I attempt learning digitally. Other times, I go to a tiny space where aid workers educate us mathematics and language. The instruction is limited – the power fails or the airstrikes begin again but in such times, I feel alive. I recollect who I was: the girl who loved numbers and poems, who believed learning could change the world.

Hostilities have stolen countless aspects; our residences, schools and relatives. I grieved for my uncle, his spouse, and their young ones. I lost my beloved urban area, my previous home, which is nothing but rubble now. But the hardest loss of all is learning, because it represents the forfeiture of tomorrow.

To the global audience, I express this: keep our hopes alive. We don’t want pity, we require steps. The youth are entitled to books, learning environments and protection. Learning is not optional, it is a fundamental entitlement. The territory is not just ruins; it is minors who still dream beneath the drones at darkness. It is my story and I will persist in composing, even if all I have left is a damaged writing tool and a scrap of damaged material.

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

Naglaa Weshah, forty, teacher in al-Bureij camp

I have been instructing in this area for more than a decade. First in Khan Younis, then in Deir al-Balah, and presently in the central camp in the middle of the territory. Before the war started, I typically educated six classes of about fourty pupils per class, almost two hundred forty individuals eager to learn.

Educating them was my vocation and delight in reality, and I still remember the sparkle in a student’s eyes when a new idea clicked; the sort of occasion every educator strives for.

I always believed learning should be dynamic. My teaching space was a space of recreation, aesthetics, and motion. We painted maps, dramatized bygone episodes, and transformed instruction into narratives.

Merriment always filled the room as curiosity displaced anxiety. Certainly, even before the war, children in Gaza were always afraid. My learning environment was a place of safety but after the seventh, the situation transformed.

My educational institution became a shelter for families running from the aerial attacks. Soon, it was attacked and completely destroyed. There are hardly any educational facilities left standing in the region now. For two years, nothing has been normal. The war has destroyed every part of our reality: safety, dwellings, educational centers, dreams. Fear and grief are perpetual experiences.

A significant number of my learners are now lost – children who mentioned dreaming of doctors, artists, and instructors. They were refused even the entitlement to survival. Those who remain experience malnutrition, relocation and exhaustion – and however, they still cling to the thirst for knowledge.

Occasionally, when the connectivity allows, I get in touch with a few of them. They write inquiring: “Are you OK, educator?” We communicate brief words, short lessons, small glimmers of interaction amid the disorder. They ask if situations will ever go back to normal. I tell them I am uncertain.

All over Gaza, instructors, volunteers and charities attempt instruction in all available spaces: in shelters, ruined educational areas, or packed refuges. Learning has become an gesture of resistance, a way to say: “We persist.” And provided that we continue learning, we will persist.

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