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'We don’t want pity, we want action'.

A young student, twelve, Khan Younis

For the past two years since I stepped into a proper school. That long since I heard the start-of-class signal at the institution I attended, occupied my place and answered questions during my preferred subject. Sometimes I still vividly remember the sounds and smells: writing residue, sharpener leftovers, cheerful echoes. But my school no longer exists; it was struck shortly after the war began. My textbooks turned to ash, and some of my friends killed.

I was in the fifth year on the seventh of October: the last day I entered the school building. That morning, warning alarms blared through the passageways. Some children cried, others held hands tightly. Our instructor sought to soothe, but even her tone wavered. I remember longing for a ordinary day; instruction, intermission, a poem recital. Instead, that day signaled the conclusion of my former reality.

Conflict has stolen countless things. But the hardest loss of all is education, because that is the loss of the future itself.

Now I dwell alongside my mother and father, two brothers and female sibling in a packed refuge in this coastal area. 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. Optimism seems delicate.

At night, I observe the stars through the holes of my temporary home and question if my peers see the identical heavens. Some message me when they can, expressing they long for education and have retained their previous journals; like relics of a vanished time. I feel guilty because I’ve lost all of mine.

I once aspired to becoming a teacher to assist local youth learn, even when existence was challenging. Now I aim for being a reporter – to compose, to speak and to demonstrate the world what it represents to be a child in the Strip. I want to narrate our accounts of fear and hunger, but also bravery. Because even here, amid death and ruins, our expressions persist.

When there’s some internet, I try to study via the web. Other times, I go to a tiny space where volunteers educate us mathematics and language. The lessons are short – the electricity cuts out or the airstrikes begin again but in such times, I experience vitality. I recall who I was: the young woman who loved numbers and poems, who thought education could transform society.

The war has taken so much; our homes, learning centers and kin. I mourned my uncle, his partner, and their offspring. I lost my beautiful city, that southern city, which is merely debris now. But the hardest loss of all is learning, because it represents the forfeiture of tomorrow.

To the international community, I express this: keep our hopes alive. Compassion isn't enough, we require steps. Young residents are entitled to texts, educational facilities and security. Schooling is not a luxury, it is a basic right. Gaza is not only destruction; it is minors who still dream under aerial surveillance at darkness. It is my story and I will continue writing, even if my only possessions is a damaged writing tool and a fragment of ripped sheet.

'They message: "are you OK, teacher?"'.

Naglaa Weshah, forty, teacher in central Gaza

I have been instructing in the region for more than a decade. Initially in that urban area, then in another location, and now in the central camp in the central Gaza Strip. Before the war started, I used to teach six classes of about fourty pupils per class, almost two hundred forty individuals eager to learn.

Educating them was my vocation and delight in reality, and I still remember the gleam in a pupil's gaze when a concept was understood; the sort of occasion every educator strives for.

I always was convinced instruction should be full of life. My teaching space was a area of play, creativity, and activity. We painted maps, acted out historical events, and turned lessons into stories.

Laughter always occupied the area as curiosity displaced fear. Certainly, even prior to conflict, young residents were always frightened. My teaching space was a secure location but after the seventh, all was altered.

My learning center became a safe haven for families fleeing the explosives. Shortly after, it was attacked and entirely ruined. There are hardly any educational facilities remaining intact in the region now. For this period, everything has been abnormal. The conflict has shattered every part of our reality: safety, residences, educational centers, hopes. Apprehension and mourning are ever-present realities.

A significant number of my students are now lost – children who spoke of aspiring to be physicians, creatives, and teachers. They were denied even the right to exist. Those who survive experience malnutrition, eviction and exhaustion – and yet, they still cling to the thirst for knowledge.

Occasionally, when the online access enables, I hear from a few of them. They write questioning: “Are you safe, instructor?” We communicate short messages, short lessons, minor flashes of contact amid the disorder. They ask if situations will ever go back to normal. I tell them I don’t know.

All over Gaza, educators, volunteers and charities attempt instruction in any feasible location: in shelters, damaged classrooms, or crowded shelters. Schooling has become an demonstration of perseverance, a way to express: “We are still here.” And so long as we persist in education, we will remain.

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