On July 29, when the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education announced the results of the general secondary school leaving exam, Sara cried. The 18-year-old saw on social media the joyous celebrations of other students in the occupied West Bank who were rejoicing over their results.
“I was supposed to be happy at that time, celebrating my graduation from high school,” she told me, her eyes welling with tears, when I visited her in her family’s tent in Gaza. “I dreamed of being among the best students and having interviews to celebrate my success.”
Sara was a student at Zahrat Al-Madain High School in Gaza City and aspired to become a doctor. The final exam, for which she would have had to work hard for months, would have allowed her to apply to study at a medical school. The exam score is the main criterion for admission to Palestinian universities.
Instead, Sara spends her time in despair: her home and her dreams of a better future have been destroyed by Israeli bombing.
She is one of 39,000 Palestinian students in Gaza who were supposed to take the final exam this year but were unable to do so.
But Sara is one of the “lucky ones.” Of the students who were supposed to finish high school, at least 450 were killed, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Education. More than 5,000 other students of various grades also perished in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, as well as more than 260 teachers.
Dozens of these high school students were likely killed in schools that have been converted into shelters for displaced Palestinians since the start of the Gaza war. There is a dark irony in the fact that Gaza’s places of learning and education have been transformed into places of death.
Since July, Israel has bombed schools 21 times, killing many. In the latest attack, the al-Tabin school in Gaza became a graveyard for more than 100 people, mostly women and children. Horrific reports describe parents searching in vain for their children, who were torn to pieces by the bombs.
According to the United Nations, 93 percent of Gaza’s 560 schools have been destroyed or damaged since October 7. About 340 of them have been directly bombed by the Israeli military. These include public and private schools as well as schools run by the UN itself. It is now clear that Israel systematically targets Gaza’s schools, and for good reason.
For Palestinians, educational spaces have always been places of learning, revolutionary activism, cultural preservation, and the preservation of relationships between Palestinian territories separated from each other by Israeli colonization. Schools have always played a crucial role in the empowerment and liberation movement of the Palestinian people.
In other words, education is a form of Palestinian resistance to Israeli attempts to eradicate the Palestinian people since the Nakba of 1948. When Jewish militias ethnically cleansed and expelled approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland, one of the first things they did upon settling in refugee camps was to open schools for their children. Education was elevated to a national value. This allowed the Palestinian education sector to grow to the point of achieving one of the highest literacy rates in the world.
It is no coincidence that Gaza, a poor, besieged and regularly bombed city, is traditionally home to some of the best students in the tawjihi exam. Gazan students are said to have achieved top marks after studying by the light of oil lamps or cell phones during regular power outages, or to have refused to stop even as Israel bombarded the enclave. Excelling in one’s studies despite all odds is a form of resistance – whether Gaza’s youth realize it or not.
What Israel is doing now is trying to destroy this form of Palestinian resistance by committing scholasticism. It is dismantling educational and cultural institutions to eradicate the means by which Palestinians can preserve and share their culture, knowledge, history, identity and values across generations. Scholasticism is a crucial aspect of genocide.
For the students who were victims of this genocidal campaign, the destruction of the education sector had devastating consequences. For many, education also gave them hope that their lives could improve and that they could lift their families out of poverty through hard work.
I thought of the desperation among Gaza’s children and youth when I saw 18-year-old Ihsan selling homemade desserts under the scorching sun on a dusty street in Deir el-Balah. I asked him why he was out in the heat. He told me he spent his days selling homemade desserts to earn some money and help his family survive.
“I lost my dreams. I dreamed of becoming an engineer, of opening my own company, of working in a corporation, but all my dreams were reduced to ashes,” he said, in despair.
Like Sara, Ihsan is also said to have passed the tawjihi exam and is looking forward to studying at a university.
I see so many bright young people in Gaza like Sara and Ihsan, who were supposed to be celebrating their high school achievements and are now mourning the dreams that were violently ripped away from them. Those who could have become future doctors and engineers in Gaza now spend their days struggling to find food and water to survive, surrounded by death and despair.
But the resistance is not dead. The desire for education among Palestinians in destroyed Gaza has not disappeared. I was reminded of this when I visited six-year-old Masa and her family in their tent in Deir el-Balah. As I spoke to her mother, who told me how her heart ached every time her daughter cried because she could not go to school, Masa kept pleading:
“Mom, I want to go to school. Let’s go to the market and buy me a bag and a school uniform.” Masa would have started first grade in September. That month would have been the time to buy all the school supplies, a uniform and a school bag, which would have brought him immense joy.
While today the calls of Palestinian children to go to school break the hearts of many parents, this thirst for education will motivate the reconstruction of Gaza’s education sector tomorrow, when this genocidal hell is over.
In a recent open letter, hundreds of academics and university staff from Gaza stressed that “rebuilding Gaza’s academic institutions is not just about education; it is a testament to our resilience, determination and unwavering commitment to ensuring a future for generations to come.”
Indeed, many Palestinians yearn to rebuild the educational institutions that are essential to their communal life and liberation, embodying the principle of sumud, or perseverance. To paraphrase the last sentence of this letter: many schools in Gaza, especially in the refugee camps, were built from tents, and Palestinians – with the support of their friends – will rebuild them again from tents.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.