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'We don’t want pity, we want action'.

Juwayriya Adwan, twelve, Khan Younis

For the past 24 months since I entered a proper school. Two years since I heard the school chime at my former school, occupied my place and participated actively during my preferred subject. Occasionally I still clearly recall the familiar scents and noises: powder from the board, wooden scraps, cheerful echoes. But my learning place was destroyed; it was bombed not long after the war began. My textbooks turned to ash, and some of my friends killed.

I was in elementary level on the seventh of October: the last day I attended classes. That morning, air raid sirens blared through the corridors. Some students wept, others clasped palms firmly. Our educator attempted reassurance, but even she sounded shaky. I remember longing for a normal day; instruction, intermission, a poem recital. Instead, that day became the last page of my old life.

Conflict has stolen countless things. But the hardest loss of all is schooling, because that is the loss of the future itself.

Now I reside with my parents, siblings and sister in a crowded shelter in Khan Younis. The tent walls move with air currents, keeping neither cold nor heat away. We wait in line for water and food. Energy access is fantasy and personal space is absent. Aspiration appears brittle.

At darkness, I look up at the celestial bodies through the openings of my tent and wonder if my peers see the identical heavens. Some message me when they manage, saying they yearn for classes and have retained their previous journals; like relics of a vanished time. I feel ashamed because I’ve lost all of mine.

I once dreamed of becoming a teacher to support young residents study, even when existence was challenging. Now I dream of being a writer – to draft, to speak and to reveal the world what it means to be a minor in this region. I want to narrate our accounts of fear and hunger, but also bravery. Because even here, amid loss and destruction, our words continue.

When online access exists, I try to study digitally. On other occasions, I visit a modest shelter where volunteers educate us mathematics and language. The sessions are brief – the electricity cuts out or the attacks recommence but in those moments, I feel alive. I recollect who I was: the young woman who loved numbers and poems, who believed education could transform society.

Hostilities have stolen countless aspects; our dwellings, learning centers and relatives. I mourned my uncle, his spouse, and their offspring. I forfeited my cherished hometown, my previous home, which is only ruins now. But the hardest loss of all is learning, because without it, our prospects disappear.

To the international community, I state this: don’t let our dreams die. We seek no sympathy, we want action. The youth are entitled to literature, schools and safety. Schooling is not optional, it is a fundamental entitlement. This region is not only destruction; it is youth who still dream beneath the drones at darkness. It is my story and I will keep drafting, even if my only possessions is a fractured utensil and a piece of torn paper.

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

An educator, forty, instructor in al-Bureij camp

I have been teaching in Gaza for a substantial period. First in that urban area, then in another location, and presently in the central camp in the central Gaza Strip. In pre-conflict times, I regularly instructed six classes of about dozens of learners, almost two hundred forty individuals enthusiastic about knowledge.

Instructing them was my purpose and joy in existence, and I still recollect the gleam in a student’s eyes when a knowledge was acquired; the type of instance every teacher strives for.

I always was convinced learning should be full of life. My learning environment was a space of play, aesthetics, and motion. We created cartographic art, acted out historical events, and converted teaching into tales.

Laughter always occupied the area as interest replaced anxiety. Indeed, even prior to conflict, young residents were always scared. My classroom was a place of safety but after that day, all was altered.

My learning center became a shelter for relatives fleeing the bombs. Shortly after, it was struck and totally demolished. There are hardly any learning institutions left standing in the region now. For 24 months, nothing has been normal. The hostilities has destroyed every part of our lives: protection, dwellings, learning places, aspirations. Anxiety and sorrow are constant companions.

A significant number of my learners are now deceased – children who mentioned dreaming of physicians, painters, and teachers. They were refused even the entitlement to survival. Those who survive experience hunger, relocation and weariness – and however, they still maintain the desire for education.

Occasionally, when the connectivity permits, I get in touch with a handful of them. They contact inquiring: “How are you, teacher?” We exchange concise phrases, miniature instruction, small glimmers of interaction amid the turmoil. They question if circumstances will ever return to usual. I state to them I don’t know.

Across the region, educators, helpers and charities endeavor education wherever possible: in temporary structures, destroyed learning spaces, or packed refuges. Schooling has become an demonstration of perseverance, a way to declare: “We persist.” And provided that we keep acquiring knowledge, we will remain.

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