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'We seek action, not sympathy'.

A young student, twelve, Khan Younis

It has been two years since I stepped into a learning environment. Two years since I heard the morning bell at my former school, occupied my place and raised my hand during my beloved lesson. Sometimes I still distinctly recollect the familiar scents and noises: chalk dust, wooden scraps, joyful sounds in corridors. But my learning place was destroyed; it was targeted shortly after the hostilities erupted. My books were burned, and companions perished.

I was in the fifth year on 7 October: the last day I entered the school building. That beginning of the day, air raid sirens screamed through the halls. Some pupils sobbed, others held hands tightly. Our instructor sought to soothe, but even her voice trembled. I remember hoping for a ordinary day; teaching, break time, a verse presentation. Instead, that day marked the end of my former reality.

The war has taken so much. But the hardest loss of all is education, because it represents the forfeiture of tomorrow.

Now I dwell alongside my parents, male relatives and sister in a packed refuge in this coastal area. The temporary partitions move with air currents, providing no climate control. We line up for nourishment and hydration. Electricity is a dream and seclusion is unavailable. Aspiration appears brittle.

At night, I gaze toward the night lights through the holes of my tent and question if my friends see the identical heavens. Some contact me when they can, expressing they long for education and have preserved their former exercise books; like treasures from a lost world. I feel ashamed because I’ve misplaced all of mine.

I once dreamed of pursuing pedagogy to support Gaza’s children learn, even when life was hard. Now I aim for being a writer – to compose, to communicate and to reveal the world what it means to be a child in this region. I want to narrate our accounts of apprehension and need, but also courage. Because even in this place, amid loss and destruction, our voices refuse to be silent.

When online access exists, I endeavor to educate myself online. Other times, I attend a tiny space where aid workers instruct us mathematics and language. The lessons are short – the electricity cuts out or the bombing resumes but in these instances, I feel alive. I recollect who I was: the young woman who loved numbers and poems, who was convinced education could transform society.

Conflict has claimed innumerable things; our homes, educational institutions and relatives. I mourned my family member, his partner, and their offspring. I forfeited my cherished hometown, Rafah, which is nothing but rubble now. But the most painful deprivation of all is schooling, because without it, our prospects disappear.

To the global audience, I express this: preserve our aspirations. We don’t want pity, we want action. The youth merit literature, educational facilities and security. Learning is not an extravagance, it is a essential privilege. This region is not merely devastation; it is children who persist in hoping under aerial surveillance at evening. It is my narrative and I will keep drafting, even if all I have left is a damaged writing tool and a scrap of damaged material.

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

Naglaa Weshah, forty, teacher in al-Bureij camp

I have been educating in Gaza for over ten years. First in that urban area, then in another location, and presently in al-Bureij camp in the central Gaza Strip. Before the war started, I regularly instructed six classes of about fourty pupils per class, almost two hundred forty individuals keen on education.

Instructing them was my purpose and joy in existence, and I still remember the gleam in a learner's look when a new idea clicked; the kind of moment every educator lives for.

I always was convinced learning should be dynamic. My classroom was a area of play, aesthetics, and movement. We created cartographic art, performed past occurrences, and transformed instruction into narratives.

Joy always filled the room as curiosity substituted fear. Indeed, even before the war, children in Gaza were always scared. My learning environment was a protected zone but after that day, all was altered.

My educational institution became a safe haven for households running from the explosives. Soon, it was targeted and entirely ruined. There are almost no schools left standing in the region now. For 24 months, everything has been abnormal. The hostilities has shattered every facet of our lives: security, homes, educational centers, aspirations. Anxiety and sorrow are constant companions.

A significant number of my pupils are now lost – minors who talked about aspiring to be physicians, painters, and teachers. They were deprived even the privilege of living. Those who survive live with malnutrition, displacement and weariness – and yet, they still hold onto the will to learn.

Occasionally, when the connectivity permits, I receive messages from a few of them. They message questioning: “Are you OK, educator?” We share short messages, short lessons, tiny sparks of connection amid the chaos. They inquire if things will ever go back to normal. I state to them I don’t know.

All over Gaza, instructors, aid workers and organizations try to teach in all available spaces: in tents, damaged classrooms, or packed refuges. Education has become an act of defiance, a way to declare: “Our presence continues.” And so long as we persist in education, we will endure.

Many of us are also parents. I am a guardian of {three|several