Amid the ruins of shattered buildings, a small tattered tent rises — a fragile shelter where children, worn by sun, hunger, and fear, gather around a small board, clutching faded notebooks as if writing upon the ashes of a burnt memory. This is not a scene from a war novel, but the new classroom of Gaza — a city struggling, for two years now, to rebuild its alphabet amid the dust of annihilation.
In Deir al-Balah, as in all displacement areas, tents have become makeshift classrooms. No desks, no walls, no books — only young faces learning through tears, mothers rotating hope among themselves, and teachers explaining lessons beneath the blazing sun.
Teacher Hanan al-Madhoun, displaced from northern Gaza, says: “Two years of students’ lives have been lost, and the entire educational system has been obliterated. Still, we try to plant hope in them despite fear and repeated displacement.”
Since the beginning of the aggression, the usurping entity has not only exterminated people but also targeted memory and consciousness. According to the Government Media Office in Gaza, 163 schools and universities have been completely destroyed, 388 educational institutions have been partially damaged, and 95% of educational facilities have sustained varying levels of destruction. More than 662 school buildings — about 80% of all schools — were directly hit.
Official statistics show that more than 785,000 students have been deprived of education for the third consecutive year, while 25,000 teachers and staff remain without work. Over 13,500 students, 830 teachers, and 193 academics have been martyred, and more than 25,000 students have been injured.
Education itself has turned into another front in the genocide — Gaza’s tents now struggle to survive, as if writing upon the wind: “We are still learning.”
Even electronic learning initiatives have failed under siege — no electricity, no internet, no safe learning environment. Hungry children cannot study, and displaced families have lost even the means to follow online lessons. The educational gap has widened into an abyss threatening entire generations with illiteracy and a stolen childhood.
In Gaza, education has become a battle of another kind — a battle to defend awareness. The occupier is not content with destroying stone; it seeks to annihilate the Palestinian mind itself. Burning schools and universities is not mere bombardment — it is an attempt to break the consciousness that views knowledge as a weapon.
Two years into the war, Gaza still opens its tent to the light. With chalk on the rubble dust, it writes that knowledge cannot be bombed — that the child writing today upon the ground will build tomorrow a school upon the ruins of fear.
For Gaza, education is no longer a lesson in reading and writing, but a declaration of life in the face of extinction — a voice that tells the world:
You may burn our books, but you will never extinguish our memory.
