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'Our plea is for action, not compassion'.

A young student, 12, al-Mawasi

For the past 24 months since I entered a real classroom. Two years since I heard the start-of-class signal at Khawla Bint al-Azwar school, occupied my place and answered questions during my favourite class. Occasionally I still distinctly recollect the sounds and smells: powder from the board, wooden scraps, cheerful echoes. But my learning place was destroyed; it was struck not long after the war began. My textbooks turned to ash, and several classmates lost.

I was in the fifth year on the seventh of October: the final day I entered the school building. That early hours, air raid sirens blared through the corridors. Some pupils sobbed, others gripped each other. Our teacher tried to calm us, but even her voice trembled. I remember wishing for a normal day; lessons, intermission, a literary performance. Instead, that day became the last page of my old life.

Hostilities have claimed innumerable aspects. But the most painful deprivation of all is schooling, because it represents the forfeiture of tomorrow.

Now I reside with my parents, siblings and sister in a crowded shelter in al-Mawasi. The tent walls move with air currents, providing no climate control. We line up for sustenance and drinks. Power is imaginary and personal space is absent. Aspiration appears brittle.

At night, I look up at the stars through the openings of my shelter and ponder if my friends see the same sky. Some reach out when they are able, expressing they long for education and have preserved their former exercise books; like treasures from a lost world. I feel guilty because I’ve misplaced all of mine.

I once envisioned becoming a teacher to assist Gaza’s children study, even when existence was challenging. Now I hope for being a reporter – to write, to speak and to reveal the world what it signifies to be a young person in Gaza. I want to narrate our accounts of apprehension and need, but also courage. Because even here, amid death and ruins, our voices refuse to be silent.

When connectivity is available, I endeavor to educate myself via the web. Sometimes, I go to a modest shelter where volunteers teach us mathematics and language. The instruction is limited – the electricity cuts out or the attacks recommence but in such times, I feel alive. I recall who I was: the young woman who loved numbers and poems, who was convinced knowledge could alter reality.

The war has taken so much; our dwellings, learning centers and families. I grieved for my paternal relative, his wife, and their children. I lost my beautiful city, my previous home, which is merely debris now. But the toughest sacrifice of all is schooling, because that is the loss of the future itself.

To the world, I express this: keep our hopes alive. Compassion isn't enough, we want action. The youth deserve literature, schools and protection. Learning is not optional, it is a essential privilege. This region is not only destruction; it is children who continue to aspire under aerial surveillance at evening. It is my narrative and I will keep drafting, even if the sole items remaining is a broken pencil and a piece of torn paper.

'Pupils inquire: "Are you alright, educator?"'.

An educator, 40, instructor in central Gaza

I have been teaching in this area for over ten years. First in that urban area, then in a different town, and now in this refugee settlement in the central Gaza Strip. Prior to hostilities, I typically educated several sets of about fourty pupils per class, nearly 240 young minds eager to learn.

Teaching them was my mission and happiness in life, and I still recall the gleam in a learner's look when a knowledge was acquired; the type of instance every educator lives for.

I always thought instruction should be vibrant. My classroom was a area of amusement, aesthetics, and movement. We painted maps, performed past occurrences, and turned lessons into stories.

Laughter always permeated the space as inquisitiveness displaced apprehension. Indeed, even in earlier times, young residents were always scared. My teaching space was a secure location but after 7 October, the situation transformed.

My learning center became a safe haven for households escaping the explosives. Not long later, it was targeted and entirely ruined. There are almost no educational facilities still erect in the region now. For this period, nothing has been normal. The war has broken every facet of our lives: safety, dwellings, learning places, aspirations. Anxiety and sorrow are ever-present realities.

Many of my pupils are now deceased – minors who mentioned aspiring to be physicians, painters, and instructors. They were refused even the right to exist. Those who remain experience malnutrition, displacement and weariness – and yet, they still cling to the desire for education.

At times, when the online access allows, I receive messages from a few of them. They message asking: “Are you safe, instructor?” We communicate concise phrases, abbreviated teaching, minor flashes of interaction amid the disorder. They inquire if things will ever revert to standard. I tell them I am uncertain.

Throughout this territory, educators, helpers and organizations try to teach in any feasible location: in shelters, destroyed learning spaces, or congested safe zones. Schooling has become an demonstration of perseverance, a way to say: “Our presence continues.” And as long as we persist in education, we will endure.

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