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'We seek action, not sympathy'.

A young student, twelve, al-Mawasi

It has been 24 months since I entered a learning environment. Two years since I listened to the school chime at Khawla Bint al-Azwar school, sat at my desk and participated actively during my beloved lesson. Sometimes I still vividly remember the familiar scents and noises: chalk dust, pencil shavings, cheerful echoes. But my learning place was destroyed; it was struck not long after the hostilities erupted. My textbooks turned to ash, and companions perished.

I was in fifth grade on the seventh of October: the concluding day I entered the school building. That beginning of the day, alert signals blared through the passageways. Some children cried, others clasped palms firmly. Our instructor sought to soothe, but even her tone wavered. I remember hoping for a normal 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 toughest sacrifice of all is education, because that is the loss of the future itself.

Now I live with my guardians, male relatives and female sibling in a crowded shelter in Khan Younis. The tent walls move with air currents, keeping neither cold nor heat away. We queue for nourishment and hydration. Power is imaginary and personal space is absent. Optimism seems delicate.

At evening, I observe the celestial bodies through the holes of my tent and wonder if my companions see the comparable vista. Some message me when they manage, saying they long for education and have kept their old notebooks; like relics of a vanished time. I feel guilty because I’ve lost all of mine.

I once envisioned pursuing pedagogy to assist Gaza’s children acquire knowledge, even when existence was challenging. Now I hope for being a journalist – to compose, to speak and to reveal the world what it represents to be a minor in the Strip. I want to narrate our accounts of anxiety and deprivation, but also bravery. Because even here, amid death and ruins, our expressions persist.

When there’s some internet, I endeavor to educate myself digitally. Sometimes, I go to a small tent where aid workers educate us mathematics and language. The lessons are short – the power fails or the airstrikes begin again but in these instances, I feel alive. I recall who I was: the young woman who cherished arithmetic and verse, who thought education could transform society.

Conflict has claimed innumerable things; our dwellings, educational institutions and kin. I grieved for my paternal relative, his partner, and their children. I forfeited my beloved urban area, Rafah, which is nothing but rubble now. But the hardest loss of all is schooling, because it represents the forfeiture of tomorrow.

To the world, I state this: keep our hopes alive. We don’t want pity, we want action. Gaza’s children are entitled to texts, educational facilities and safety. Learning is not a luxury, it is a essential privilege. Gaza is not just ruins; it is minors who persist in hoping beneath the drones at evening. It is my story and I will keep drafting, even if all I have left is a broken pencil and a fragment of ripped sheet.

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

Naglaa Weshah, forty, instructor in al-Bureij camp

I have been teaching in this area for a substantial period. First in a southern city, then in another location, and currently in the central camp in the central Gaza Strip. Prior to hostilities, I used to teach several sets of about fourty pupils per class, almost two hundred forty individuals keen on education.

Educating them was my purpose and joy in life, and I still recall the sparkle in a learner's look when a knowledge was acquired; the type of instance every educator cherishes.

I always thought education should be full of life. My learning environment was a zone of recreation, aesthetics, and movement. We created cartographic art, acted out historical events, and transformed instruction into narratives.

Joy always occupied the area as interest displaced fear. Certainly, even in earlier times, local youth were always scared. My learning environment was a protected zone but after that day, all was altered.

My school became a refuge for households fleeing the aerial attacks. Not long later, it was targeted and completely destroyed. There are almost no educational facilities still erect in this area now. For two years, all has been unusual. The hostilities has broken every part of our reality: protection, dwellings, schools, hopes. Anxiety and sorrow are perpetual experiences.

A significant number of my learners are now deceased – youth who spoke of becoming doctors, painters, and teachers. They were refused even the entitlement to survival. Those who remain endure hunger, eviction and exhaustion – and however, they still cling to the desire for education.

Occasionally, when the connectivity enables, I receive messages from a handful of them. They message asking: “How are you, instructor?” We communicate concise phrases, short lessons, small glimmers of contact amid the chaos. They question if things will ever go back to normal. I tell them I am uncertain.

Across Gaza, teachers, aid workers and charities endeavor education wherever possible: in tents, destroyed learning spaces, or packed refuges. Learning has become an gesture of resistance, a way to express: “We are still here.” And so long as we persist in education, we will persist.

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