Maha Ali was determined to one day become a journalist and report on events in Gaza. Now she and other students have only one ambition: finding food like hunger ravages the Palestinian enclave.
While war is raging, she lives among the ruins of the Islamic University, a teaching establishment formerly which, like most of the others in Gaza, has become a refuge for displaced people.
“We have said for a long time that we want to live, we want to settle down, we want to travel. Now we say that we want to eat,” said the 26 -year -old student.
Ali is part of a generation of Palestinians in Gaza – from primary school to university students – who say they have been deprived of education by almost two years of Israeli air strikes that have destroyed the Enclave institutions.
More than 61,000 people were killed by the War of Israel against Gaza, according to the Gaza health authorities. A large part of the enclave, which suffered from poverty and high unemployment even before the war, was demolished.
The Palestinian Minister of Education, Amjad Barham, accused Israel of having carried out a systematic destruction of schools and universities, saying that 293 of the 307 schools were destroyed completely or partially.
“With that, the occupation wants to kill hope inside our sons and daughters,” he said.
The United Nations Bureau for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said, according to the latest assessment of satellite damage in July, 97% of educational facilities in Gaza underwent a certain level of damage, 91% requiring major rehabilitation or complete reconstruction to become functional again.
“The restrictions of the Israeli authorities continue to limit the entry of educational supplies to Gaza, undermining the scale and the quality of interventions,” he said.
These dark statistics paint a dark future for Yasmine Al-Za’aneen, 19, sitting in a tent for the displaced and sorting through books that have survived the Israeli strikes and the trip.
She recalled how immersed in her studies, print papers, find an office and adapt it to lights.
“Because of the war, everything was arrested. I mean everything I had built, everything I had done. In a few seconds, he had left,” she said.
There is no immediate hope of relief or return to class.
Israel plans a new Gaza offensive, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that he expected to finish “fairly quickly”, while the United Nations Security Council heard new end of suffering requests in the Palestinian enclave.
Saja Adwan, 19, student at the Al-Azhar Institute specialist who lives in a school turned a shelter with her nine-year-old family, recalled how the building where she learned was bombed.
His books and study equipment have disappeared. To keep her mind occupied, she takes notes on the meager educational documents she left.
“All my memories were there-my ambitions, my goals. I had a dream there. It was a life for me. When I went to the Institute, I felt psychologically at ease,” she said.
“My studies were there; My life, my future, where I would get my diploma. ”