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'We seek action, not sympathy'.

A young student, 12, a temporary shelter

For the past two years since I stepped into a proper school. Two years since I heard the morning bell at Khawla Bint al-Azwar school, took my seat and raised my hand during my beloved lesson. At times I still distinctly recollect the familiar scents and noises: powder from the board, wooden scraps, cheerful echoes. But my learning place was destroyed; it was bombed soon after the hostilities erupted. My books were burned, and some of my friends killed.

I was in the fifth year on 7 October: the last day I entered the school building. That beginning of the day, warning alarms blared through the passageways. Some students wept, others clasped palms firmly. Our teacher tried to calm us, but even she sounded shaky. I remember longing for a routine day; lessons, intermission, a verse presentation. Instead, that day signaled the conclusion of my old life.

Conflict has stolen countless things. But the toughest sacrifice of all is schooling, because without it, our prospects disappear.

Now I live with my mother and father, siblings and female sibling in a packed refuge in this coastal area. The shelter coverings sway with breezes, keeping neither cold nor heat away. We queue for nourishment and hydration. Energy access is fantasy and personal space is absent. Optimism seems delicate.

At evening, I gaze toward the stars through the gaps of my temporary home and ponder if my peers see the same sky. Some message me when they are able, expressing they miss school and have preserved their previous journals; like treasures from a lost world. I feel ashamed because I’ve lost all of mine.

I once aspired to pursuing pedagogy to help young residents learn, even when life was hard. Now I dream of being a reporter – to write, to talk and to reveal the world what it represents to be a young person in Gaza. I want to narrate our accounts of anxiety and deprivation, but also courage. Because even in this place, amid death and ruins, our voices refuse to be silent.

When there’s some internet, I try to study online. Other times, I attend a modest shelter where helpers instruct us mathematics and language. The lessons are short – the power fails or the airstrikes begin again but in these instances, I sense being. I recall who I was: the girl who cherished arithmetic and verse, who believed education could transform society.

The war has taken so much; our residences, learning centers and relatives. I lost my family member, his spouse, and their children. I said goodbye to my cherished hometown, that southern city, which is nothing but rubble now. But the hardest loss of all is learning, because that is the loss of the future itself.

To the world, I say this: keep our hopes alive. We seek no sympathy, we require steps. Gaza’s children deserve texts, educational facilities and safety. Schooling is not a luxury, it is a basic right. This region is not merely devastation; it is children who persist in hoping beneath the drones at evening. It is my narrative and I will continue writing, even if all I have left is a damaged writing tool and a fragment of ripped sheet.

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

An educator, forty, instructor in a refugee camp

I have been instructing in the region for a substantial period. Initially in a southern city, then in Deir al-Balah, and now in al-Bureij camp in the heart of the region. Before the war started, I typically educated multiple groups of about dozens of learners, nearly 240 young minds eager to learn.

Educating them was my vocation and delight in reality, and I still recollect the gleam in a student’s eyes when a concept was understood; the sort of occasion every teacher lives for.

I always believed instruction should be full of life. My learning environment was a zone of amusement, creativity, and movement. We created cartographic art, performed past occurrences, and transformed instruction into narratives.

Merriment always permeated the space as inquisitiveness displaced fear. Indeed, even in earlier times, local youth were always afraid. My classroom was a secure location but after the seventh, all was altered.

My educational institution became a safe haven for families running from the bombs. Shortly after, it was struck and entirely ruined. There are hardly any schools left standing in the region now. For 24 months, everything has been abnormal. The hostilities has destroyed every facet of our existence: safety, residences, educational centers, hopes. Anxiety and sorrow are constant companions.

Many of my students are now deceased – minors who spoke of dreaming of physicians, creatives, and instructors. They were denied even the entitlement to survival. Those who are still here endure malnutrition, eviction and weariness – and yet, they still maintain the will to learn.

At times, when the connectivity permits, I hear from a few of them. They write inquiring: “Are you OK, instructor?” We exchange concise phrases, abbreviated teaching, tiny sparks of interaction amid the disorder. They ask if situations will ever go back to normal. I state to them I have no answer.

Across the region, teachers, helpers and non-profits endeavor education in all available spaces: in tents, ruined educational areas, or packed refuges. Schooling has become an gesture of resistance, a way to express: “We are still here.” And as long as we continue learning, we will remain.

A significant number of us are also caregivers. I am a mother of {three|several