My school in the Khan Younis refugee camp was one of my favorite places. I had dedicated teachers and a deep love for learning, so much so that education became my life’s work. But beyond the joy of learning, the school was a place where we Palestinians could connect with those we could not easily meet: the Palestinians of the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, the Palestinians of our history and the Palestinian writers, poets and intellectuals who have told our story in exile. Education is how we have woven the fabric of our nation.
Palestinians are renowned for having one of the highest literacy rates in the world. They are often considered the best educated refugees in the world. Education is both part of our national history and a methodology for transmitting it.
The annual tawjihi (national high school exam) is a key moment in the Palestinian liberation calendar. Each year, the announcement of tawjihi results triggers vast celebrations broadcast across the country, showcasing and honoring the achievements of top-performing students. The moment of euphoria transcends individual success, serving as a collective affirmation of our students’ ability to persevere and excel despite the relentless challenges placed upon them.
In the summer of 2024, for the first time since 1967, there was no tawjihi exam in Gaza. There were no celebrations.
Israel’s decimation of Gaza’s education system has caused immense pain and despair among hundreds of thousands of children and young people. Yet the desire for education is so tenacious among Palestinians that even in the midst of genocide, they never stop trying to learn.
When I think of this indomitable spirit, I think of my cousin Jihan, a freelance civil society worker with a master’s degree in diplomacy and international relations. She and her three daughters have been living in a tent in al-Mawasi for 10 months. Her husband, a doctor, and their son were victims of enforced disappearance by the Israeli army at the start of the genocide.
While living in deplorable conditions in the displaced camp, she and her daughters decided to help students access their education despite the looming calamity. Using a solar panel, they installed a small charging station and hotspot, where anyone can charge their device and use the internet in exchange for a small fee.
Two of their regular visitors are my husband’s relatives: Shahd, a multimedia student, and her brother Bilal, a medical student. They were studying at Al-Azhar and Al-Aqsa universities respectively, but the Israeli army destroyed them both. Last year, they joined an online learning initiative launched by Gaza’s university authorities to enable 90,000 university students to complete their higher education.
Shahd and Bilal told me they had to walk for hours to reach the Jihan charging station to access the class notes. Every time they leave their tent for the trip, they hug their family tightly, aware that they may not return. Their parents are worried, especially for Bilal, because young men are often the targets of drone strikes. To ensure her safety, Shahd sometimes makes the trip alone, taking her phone and that of her brother with her to recharge and download her lessons.
The queues are long, with hundreds of young people queuing to get access to enough electricity to charge a laptop or phone. The internet signal is weak so downloads are slow. The whole process sometimes takes a whole day.
As the eldest daughter, Shahd dreams of graduating and making her parents proud, bringing a little light into their dark world. Her father was recently diagnosed with colon cancer, and the family now faces a new level of fear and loss, given the collapse of the healthcare system and the genocide.
Shahd told me she clings to the hope that somehow, through the small victory of graduation, she could transform this harsh reality. She is fully aware of the risks. “At every step, I wonder if I’ll come back. My dream is to finish my studies, get my diploma and find a job to help my family,” she told me.
“I have seen people burned, disfigured, evaporated and even abandoned in search of stray animals. I have seen body parts hanging from power lines, on roofs, transported by animal-drawn carts, or carried on shoulders. I pray that this is not how I will die. I must die in one piece with my mother able to say goodbye and be buried with dignity,” she added.
Everywhere, massacres of students and attacks on schools or universities are a tragedy. But in Palestine, where education is more than a right or a dream, such attacks also target our national identity.
Israel is well aware of this and the destruction of Gaza’s education system is part of its long-standing strategy to erase Palestinian identity, history and intellectual vitality.
My generation also experienced an Israeli attack on education, although much less deadly and destructive. From 1987 to 1993, during the First Intifada, Israel imposed the complete closure of all universities in Gaza and the West Bank as a form of collective punishment, depriving tens of thousands of students of the right to higher education. At the same time, an Israeli military curfew confined us to our homes every evening, from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. Israeli soldiers were ordered to shoot any offenders. Schools were raided, attacked and closed for weeks, even months.
Despite this violence and disruption, education has become an act of resistance. Like the other 18,000 tawjihi students in Gaza in 1989, I studied tirelessly. I achieved the high grades required to pursue prestigious studies, usually in medicine or engineering.
My family was delighted. To celebrate my achievement, my father made a big pot of tea, bought a box of Salvana chocolates and rushed to the family diwan at Khan Younis camp, where our family mukhtar served Arabic coffee. People also came to congratulate my mother at home. But this fleeting joy quickly turned into despair. With universities closed, I had to wait five long years, clinging tightly to the dream of continuing my studies.
Mahmoud Darwish was right: Palestinians are suffering from an incurable disease called hope. And paradoxically, the restrictions imposed by the occupation during the first Intifada created fertile ground for activism, resistance and community work. In the absence of formal institutions, young people deprived of university education joined educational committees formed by civil society across Palestine.
We have transformed homes, mosques and community halls into makeshift classrooms. Often, we had to scale walls and sneak through alleys to reach students without being detected by Israeli soldiers enforcing the curfew. Teachers also resisted by opening their homes to students, risking arrest and imprisonment to ensure learning continued. Thousands of people enrolled, studied and even graduated under these appalling conditions.
When universities finally reopened in 1994, I was part of the first cohort to start studying, along with six of my siblings. It was a moment of triumph for my family, although it placed a heavy financial burden on my father, who had to pay the tuition fees for many of us. The reopening of universities was not just a restoration of education but a recovery of a vital part of Palestinian identity and resistance.
The term “scolasticide,” coined by Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi during the 2009 war on Gaza, reflects the reality we have faced for decades. Scholasticide is the deliberate erasure of indigenous knowledge and cultural continuity. It is an attempt to sever the links between a people and their collective intellectual and historical identity.
Today, the reality is even more serious. Gaza’s 12 universities are all in ruins and at least 88 percent of all Gaza schools have been damaged or destroyed.
The physical destruction of infrastructure is accompanied by efforts to destroy the legitimacy of the institutions that provide education. In late October, Israel effectively banned UNRWA from operating. Given that this UN agency operates 284 schools in Gaza and 96 in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, this ban is another blow to Palestine’s intellectual future.
Yet, just as we have resisted in the past, Palestinians in Gaza continue to resist this systematic erasure of their educational and cultural ties. Education is not just a tool for survival: it is the fabric that binds our nation, the bridge to our history, and the foundation of our hope for liberation.
When I think of the immense destruction of Gaza’s education system and of all those students who defy all odds to continue their studies, I am reminded of the lines from Enemy of the Sun, a 1970 poem by Samih al-Qasem, known as the “poet of Palestinian resistance”. “.
“You can plunder my inheritance,
Burn my books, my poems,
Give my flesh to the dogs,
You can spread a web of terror
on the roofs of my village
O Enemy of the Sun,
But I won’t compromise,
And until the last beat of my veins,
I will resist.
Palestinian students will continue this resistance by walking hours every day to access their education. It is the spirit of a people who refuse to be erased as individuals, as a nation, as a historical fact and as a future reality.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
