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'We don’t want pity, we want action'.

Juwayriya Adwan, twelve, al-Mawasi

For the past 24 months since I entered a learning environment. That long since I heard the morning bell at my former school, took my seat and participated actively during my favourite class. Sometimes I still clearly recall the auditory and olfactory sensations: powder from the board, sharpener leftovers, laughter echoing down the halls. But my educational institution is gone; it was struck soon after the conflict started. My books were burned, and several classmates lost.

I was in fifth grade on the seventh of October: the concluding day I attended classes. That beginning of the day, warning alarms sounded through the halls. Some students wept, others clasped palms firmly. Our instructor sought to soothe, but even her voice trembled. I remember hoping for a routine day; instruction, break time, a poem recital. Instead, that day marked the end of my previous existence.

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 dwell alongside my mother and father, siblings and female sibling in a congested safe space in this coastal area. The temporary partitions sway with breezes, keeping neither cold nor heat away. We queue for sustenance and drinks. Power is imaginary and privacy doesn’t exist. Hope feels fragile.

At night, I observe the stars through the openings of my temporary home and question if my peers see the identical heavens. Some contact me when they are able, expressing they yearn for classes and have preserved their previous journals; like treasures from a lost world. I feel guilty because I’ve lost all of mine.

I once aspired to becoming a teacher to help Gaza’s children study, even when circumstances were difficult. Now I dream of being a reporter – to compose, to speak and to reveal the world what it signifies to be a minor in Gaza. I want to narrate our accounts of apprehension and need, but also fortitude. Because even here, amid fatality and debris, our voices refuse to be silent.

When online access exists, I endeavor to educate myself via the web. Sometimes, I visit a modest shelter where helpers teach us mathematics and language. The lessons are short – the energy supply stops or the attacks recommence but in such times, I sense being. I recollect who I was: the student who adored mathematics and poetry, who was convinced learning could change the world.

Conflict has claimed innumerable things; our homes, learning centers and kin. I grieved for my family member, his spouse, and their offspring. I lost my beautiful city, my previous home, which is only ruins now. But the most painful deprivation of all is learning, because it represents the forfeiture of tomorrow.

To the global audience, I state this: keep our hopes alive. We seek no sympathy, we require steps. The youth are entitled to books, educational facilities and safety. Schooling is not optional, it is a essential privilege. This region is not merely devastation; it is children who still dream under aerial surveillance at darkness. It is my narrative and I will keep drafting, even if all I have left is a broken pencil and a fragment of ripped sheet.

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

Naglaa Weshah, forty, instructor in a refugee camp

I have been teaching in the region for more than a decade. First in Khan Younis, then in a different town, and now in the central camp in the middle of the territory. Before the war started, I typically educated six classes of about dozens of learners, almost two hundred forty individuals eager to learn.

Teaching them was my mission and happiness in reality, and I still remember the sparkle in a pupil's gaze when a knowledge was acquired; the sort of occasion every educator strives for.

I always thought instruction should be dynamic. My learning environment was a space of amusement, art, and motion. We created cartographic art, dramatized bygone episodes, and converted teaching into tales.

Merriment always filled the room as interest replaced anxiety. Certainly, even in earlier times, children in Gaza were always scared. My classroom was a secure location but after 7 October, everything changed.

My educational institution became a shelter for families running from the bombs. Soon, it was attacked and entirely ruined. There are very few learning institutions remaining intact in Gaza now. For two years, everything has been abnormal. The hostilities has broken every part of our existence: safety, homes, schools, aspirations. Apprehension and mourning are perpetual experiences.

A significant number of my students are now lost – children who talked about dreaming of medical professionals, painters, and educators. They were refused even the entitlement to survival. Those who survive live with malnutrition, eviction and exhaustion – and nevertheless, they still maintain the thirst for knowledge.

At times, when the connectivity enables, I get in touch with a small number of them. They write inquiring: “Are you safe, instructor?” We share short messages, abbreviated teaching, minor flashes of contact amid the turmoil. They ask if circumstances will ever return to usual. I state to them I am uncertain.

All over Gaza, educators, helpers and non-profits attempt instruction wherever possible: in tents, ruined educational areas, or crowded shelters. Learning has become an act of defiance, a way to declare: “We persist.” And so long as we continue learning, we will remain.

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