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'We don’t want pity, we want action'.

A young student, twelve, a temporary shelter

For the past two years since I was last inside a real classroom. That long since I listened to the start-of-class signal at Khawla Bint al-Azwar school, occupied my place and answered questions during my beloved lesson. Occasionally I still distinctly recollect the familiar scents and noises: writing residue, sharpener leftovers, cheerful echoes. But my educational institution is gone; it was bombed soon after the conflict started. My textbooks turned to ash, and companions perished.

I was in elementary level on the seventh of October: the final day I entered the school building. That morning, warning alarms sounded through the passageways. Some students wept, others gripped each other. Our teacher tried to calm us, but even she sounded shaky. I remember wishing for a ordinary day; instruction, break time, a poem recital. Instead, that day signaled the conclusion of my former reality.

Hostilities have claimed innumerable aspects. But the most painful deprivation of all is learning, because that is the loss of the future itself.

Now I live with my mother and father, two brothers and female sibling in a congested safe space in Khan Younis. The tent walls move with air currents, keeping neither cold nor heat away. We line up for sustenance and drinks. Electricity is a dream and privacy doesn’t exist. Optimism seems delicate.

At night, I gaze toward the night lights through the gaps of my shelter and wonder if my peers see the comparable vista. Some contact me when they are able, saying they yearn for classes and have kept their old notebooks; like treasures from a lost world. I feel ashamed because I’ve misplaced all of mine.

I once envisioned entering the education field to assist local youth study, even when circumstances were difficult. Now I dream of being a writer – to compose, to speak and to demonstrate the world what it represents to be a child in Gaza. I want to tell our stories of anxiety and deprivation, but also courage. Because even amid these conditions, amid fatality and debris, our expressions persist.

When online access exists, I try to study via the web. Other times, I go to a tiny space where volunteers teach us mathematics and language. The lessons are short – the energy supply stops or the airstrikes begin again but in those moments, I experience vitality. I recollect who I was: the young woman who adored mathematics and poetry, who believed education could transform society.

The war has taken so much; our homes, educational institutions and kin. I grieved for my uncle, his wife, and their young ones. I lost my cherished hometown, Rafah, which is merely debris now. But the hardest loss of all is schooling, because it represents the forfeiture of tomorrow.

To the world, I state this: don’t let our dreams die. Compassion isn't enough, we demand measures. The youth deserve books, educational facilities and safety. Schooling is not optional, it is a essential privilege. Gaza is not only destruction; it is minors who persist in hoping under aerial surveillance at evening. It is my narrative and I will keep drafting, even if the sole items remaining is a broken pencil and a fragment of ripped sheet.

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

An educator, forty, teacher in central Gaza

I have been teaching in Gaza for more than a decade. Originally in a southern city, then in a different town, and now in al-Bureij camp in the middle of the territory. Before the war started, I used to teach six classes of about 40 students each, almost two hundred forty individuals enthusiastic about knowledge.

Instructing them was my purpose and joy in reality, and I still remember the twinkle in a student’s eyes when a new idea clicked; the type of instance every teacher lives for.

I always thought instruction should be dynamic. My learning environment was a area of amusement, aesthetics, and motion. We created cartographic art, performed past occurrences, and transformed instruction into narratives.

Laughter always filled the room as interest substituted apprehension. Certainly, even before the war, children in Gaza were always frightened. My teaching space was a secure location but after that day, all was altered.

My learning center became a refuge for households escaping the bombs. Soon, it was struck and entirely ruined. There are very few educational facilities left standing in Gaza now. For two years, everything has been abnormal. The conflict has destroyed every aspect of our reality: safety, residences, learning places, aspirations. Fear and grief are constant companions.

Many of my pupils are now lost – youth who mentioned becoming physicians, painters, and educators. They were refused even the right to exist. Those who remain live with hunger, displacement and fatigue – and yet, they still maintain the thirst for knowledge.

At times, when the connectivity enables, I hear from a handful of them. They contact asking: “Are you OK, instructor?” We exchange concise phrases, abbreviated teaching, tiny sparks of interaction amid the disorder. They inquire if things will ever return to usual. I inform them I am uncertain.

Across the region, educators, helpers and charities attempt instruction in all available spaces: in temporary structures, destroyed learning spaces, or congested safe zones. Education has become an act of defiance, a way to declare: “We are still here.” And provided that we persist in education, we will endure.

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