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'We don’t want pity, we want action'.

Juwayriya Adwan, twelve, a temporary shelter

For the past 24 months since I stepped into a proper school. Two years since I heard the school chime at Khawla Bint al-Azwar school, took my seat and participated actively during my favourite class. At times I still clearly recall the familiar scents and noises: chalk dust, pencil shavings, cheerful echoes. But my school no longer exists; it was targeted soon after the hostilities erupted. My books were burned, and companions perished.

I was in elementary level on that fateful day: the concluding day I entered the school building. That morning, warning alarms sounded through the passageways. Some children cried, others held hands tightly. Our instructor sought to soothe, but even her voice trembled. I remember wishing for a ordinary day; teaching, break time, a poem recital. Instead, that day signaled the conclusion of my old life.

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

Now I reside with my mother and father, two brothers and sister in a crowded shelter in Khan Younis. The tent walls move with air currents, failing to insulate. We wait in line for nourishment and hydration. Power is imaginary and seclusion is unavailable. Aspiration appears brittle.

At darkness, I observe the stars through the holes of my shelter and ponder if my peers see the comparable vista. Some message me when they manage, expressing they long for education and have preserved their previous journals; like treasures from a lost world. I feel remorseful because I’ve lost all of mine.

I once aspired to entering the education field to assist local youth study, even when circumstances were difficult. Now I aim for being a writer – to compose, to communicate and to show the world what it means to be a minor in this region. I want to share our experiences of apprehension and need, but also fortitude. Because even amid these conditions, amid fatality and debris, our words continue.

When there’s some internet, I endeavor to educate myself via the web. On other occasions, I visit a small tent where aid workers teach us arithmetic and Arabic. The sessions are brief – the power fails or the attacks recommence but in such times, I feel alive. I recollect who I was: the young woman who adored mathematics and poetry, who believed knowledge could alter reality.

Conflict has claimed innumerable things; our dwellings, educational institutions and kin. I mourned my uncle, his spouse, and their young ones. I lost my cherished hometown, my previous home, which is only ruins now. But the most painful deprivation of all is learning, because without it, our prospects disappear.

To the world, I express this: keep our hopes alive. We seek no sympathy, we demand measures. Gaza’s children deserve literature, schools and safety. Learning is not a luxury, it is a essential privilege. Gaza is not only destruction; it is minors who still dream beneath the drones at evening. It is my story and I will keep drafting, even if all I have left is a fractured utensil and a fragment of ripped sheet.

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

An educator, forty, teacher in a refugee camp

I have been educating in the region for a substantial period. Originally in a southern city, then in a different town, and now in this refugee settlement in the central Gaza Strip. In pre-conflict times, I regularly instructed six classes of about 40 students each, hundreds of eager students eager to learn.

Teaching them was my mission and happiness in existence, and I still recollect the gleam in a student’s eyes when a concept was understood; the sort of occasion every instructor lives for.

I always was convinced education should be vibrant. My classroom was a area of play, aesthetics, and activity. We designed geographical illustrations, acted out historical events, and turned lessons into stories.

Laughter always filled the room as inquisitiveness displaced anxiety. Certainly, even in earlier times, children in Gaza were always scared. My learning environment was a place of safety but after the seventh, everything changed.

My school became a refuge for households fleeing the bombs. Not long later, it was attacked and completely destroyed. There are hardly any learning institutions still erect in the region now. For two years, everything has been abnormal. The war has broken every aspect of our lives: protection, dwellings, learning places, dreams. Apprehension and mourning are ever-present realities.

Numerous of my students are now lost – youth who mentioned dreaming of medical professionals, painters, and teachers. They were deprived even the entitlement to survival. Those who survive live with hunger, eviction and exhaustion – and yet, they still maintain the desire for education.

At times, when the connectivity enables, I receive messages from a small number of them. They contact inquiring: “Are you OK, instructor?” We share concise phrases, miniature instruction, minor flashes of contact amid the chaos. They ask if circumstances will ever return to usual. I inform them I don’t know.

All over Gaza, instructors, helpers and organizations endeavor education in all available spaces: in tents, damaged classrooms, or crowded shelters. Education has become an act of defiance, a way to say: “We are still here.” And as long as we continue learning, we will endure.

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