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'We seek action, not sympathy'.

A young student, 12, a temporary shelter

For the past 24 months since I entered a learning environment. Two years since I listened to the morning bell at Khawla Bint al-Azwar school, sat at my desk and raised my hand during my beloved lesson. Sometimes I still distinctly recollect the familiar scents and noises: writing residue, wooden scraps, cheerful echoes. But my learning place was destroyed; it was struck shortly after the conflict started. My learning materials incinerated, and several classmates lost.

I was in elementary level on that fateful day: the final day I went to school. That beginning of the day, warning alarms blared through the halls. Some students wept, others clasped palms firmly. Our teacher tried to calm us, but even her tone wavered. I remember wishing for a normal day; instruction, intermission, a literary performance. Instead, that day signaled the conclusion of my former reality.

The war has taken so much. But the most painful deprivation of all is learning, because without it, our prospects disappear.

Now I live with my parents, two brothers and sister in a packed refuge in Khan Younis. The temporary partitions sway with breezes, failing to insulate. We wait in line for nourishment and hydration. Power is imaginary and seclusion is unavailable. Hope feels fragile.

At night, I observe the celestial bodies through the holes of my temporary home and wonder if my companions see the comparable vista. Some reach out when they manage, expressing they long for education and have preserved their old notebooks; like relics of a vanished time. I feel ashamed because I’ve forfeited all of mine.

I once aspired to entering the education field to support young residents learn, even when life was hard. Now I dream of being a journalist – to draft, to communicate and to demonstrate the world what it signifies to be a young person in this region. I want to narrate our accounts of anxiety and deprivation, but also fortitude. Because even here, amid fatality and debris, our expressions persist.

When connectivity is available, I endeavor to educate myself via the web. Sometimes, I visit a small tent where volunteers teach us math and Arabic. The instruction is limited – the electricity cuts out or the attacks recommence but in those moments, I feel alive. I remember who I was: the young woman who loved numbers and poems, who thought learning could change the world.

The war has taken so much; our residences, schools and relatives. I lost my paternal relative, his spouse, and their young ones. I forfeited my cherished hometown, that southern city, which is nothing but rubble now. But the toughest sacrifice of all is schooling, because it represents the forfeiture of tomorrow.

To the world, I say this: preserve our aspirations. Compassion isn't enough, we demand measures. The youth deserve books, educational facilities and safety. Schooling is not a luxury, it is a essential privilege. The territory is not merely devastation; it is children who still dream amid unmanned aircraft at evening. It is my account and I will persist in composing, even if my only possessions is a fractured utensil and a scrap of damaged material.

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

An educator, forty, instructor in a refugee camp

I have been educating in Gaza for more than a decade. Initially in Khan Younis, then in Deir al-Balah, and currently in al-Bureij camp in the central Gaza Strip. In pre-conflict times, I used to teach six classes of about dozens of learners, almost two hundred forty individuals keen on education.

Teaching them was my purpose and joy in existence, and I still recall the sparkle in a pupil's gaze when a concept was understood; the sort of occasion every educator lives for.

I always thought learning should be vibrant. My classroom was a area of recreation, creativity, and motion. We created cartographic art, performed past occurrences, and turned lessons into stories.

Merriment always occupied the area as inquisitiveness displaced apprehension. Certainly, even prior to conflict, children in Gaza were always frightened. My learning environment was a secure location but after the seventh, all was altered.

My learning center became a safe haven for households running from the explosives. Not long later, it was targeted and entirely ruined. There are very few educational facilities remaining intact in Gaza now. For 24 months, all has been unusual. The war has broken every aspect of our lives: protection, dwellings, schools, aspirations. Anxiety and sorrow are constant companions.

Many of my students are now lost – children who talked about aspiring to be doctors, creatives, and instructors. They were refused even the right to exist. Those who survive experience starvation, eviction and fatigue – and yet, they still cling to the thirst for knowledge.

At times, when the online access allows, I hear from a few of them. They contact asking: “Are you OK, educator?” We communicate short messages, abbreviated teaching, small glimmers of contact amid the chaos. They inquire if circumstances will ever revert to standard. I inform them I don’t know.

Throughout Gaza, teachers, volunteers and non-profits attempt instruction in any feasible location: in temporary structures, ruined educational areas, or packed refuges. Schooling has become an gesture of resistance, a way to say: “Our presence continues.” And provided that we persist in education, we will persist.

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