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'Our plea is for action, not compassion'.

Juwayriya Adwan, twelve, a temporary shelter

For the past two years since I was last inside a proper school. Two years since I heard the start-of-class signal at my former school, took my seat and participated actively during my favourite class. At times I still clearly recall the auditory and olfactory sensations: chalk dust, sharpener leftovers, cheerful echoes. But my learning place was destroyed; it was targeted not long after the war began. My textbooks turned to ash, and companions perished.

I was in the fifth year on 7 October: the last day I attended classes. That early hours, alert signals sounded through the passageways. Some students wept, others clasped palms firmly. Our teacher tried to calm us, but even she sounded shaky. I remember wishing for a routine day; instruction, recess, a poem recital. Instead, that day became the last page of my old life.

Hostilities have claimed innumerable aspects. But the hardest loss of all is education, because without it, our prospects disappear.

Now I reside with my guardians, male relatives and female sibling in a crowded shelter in this coastal area. The shelter coverings move with air currents, keeping neither cold nor heat away. We queue for sustenance and drinks. Power is imaginary and privacy doesn’t exist. Hope feels fragile.

At night, I observe the night lights through the holes of my tent and question 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 ashamed because I’ve forfeited all of mine.

I once aspired to entering the education field to assist young residents study, even when existence was challenging. Now I aim for being a writer – to compose, to talk and to show the world what it represents to be a young person in the Strip. I want to share our experiences of apprehension and need, but also courage. Because even amid these conditions, amid fatality and debris, our voices refuse to be silent.

When connectivity is available, I attempt learning digitally. Other times, I attend a modest shelter where aid workers teach us mathematics and language. The sessions are brief – the electricity cuts out or the bombing resumes but in these instances, I feel alive. I recollect who I was: the girl who adored mathematics and poetry, who was convinced knowledge could alter reality.

Conflict has claimed innumerable things; our residences, educational institutions and kin. I grieved for my paternal relative, his partner, and their offspring. I forfeited my beloved urban area, Rafah, which is nothing but rubble now. But the toughest sacrifice of all is schooling, because that is the loss of the future itself.

To the international community, I state this: preserve our aspirations. We seek no sympathy, we require steps. The youth are entitled to books, schools and security. Education is not a luxury, it is a basic right. The territory is not only destruction; it is children who still dream under aerial surveillance at evening. It is my narrative and I will continue writing, even if the sole items remaining is a broken pencil and a scrap of damaged material.

'They message: "are you OK, teacher?"'.

An educator, 40, teacher in central Gaza

I have been instructing in this area for more than a decade. Initially in that urban area, then in a different town, and presently in this refugee settlement in the heart of the region. In pre-conflict times, I used to teach six classes of about 40 students each, nearly 240 young minds keen on education.

Educating them was my vocation and delight in existence, and I still remember the sparkle in a learner's look when a knowledge was acquired; the sort of occasion every educator cherishes.

I always was convinced learning should be dynamic. My learning environment was a space of play, creativity, and motion. We created cartographic art, performed past occurrences, and transformed instruction into narratives.

Joy always permeated the space as inquisitiveness displaced anxiety. Yes, even in earlier times, local youth were always afraid. My learning environment was a place of safety but after 7 October, all was altered.

My educational institution became a shelter for households fleeing the bombs. Soon, it was attacked and entirely ruined. There are hardly any learning institutions left standing in the region now. For this period, nothing has been normal. The hostilities has destroyed every facet of our reality: safety, dwellings, learning places, aspirations. Apprehension and mourning are constant companions.

Numerous of my learners are now lost – youth who spoke of dreaming of medical professionals, creatives, and teachers. They were denied even the entitlement to survival. Those who remain experience hunger, relocation and exhaustion – and nevertheless, they still maintain the will to learn.

At times, when the online access allows, I receive messages from a handful of them. They message asking: “How are you, instructor?” We share concise phrases, miniature instruction, small glimmers of interaction amid the disorder. They inquire if situations will ever return to usual. I inform them I am uncertain.

Throughout this territory, educators, aid workers and organizations endeavor education wherever possible: in tents, ruined educational areas, or congested safe zones. Learning has become an gesture of resistance, a way to express: “We persist.” And provided that we persist in education, we will persist.

A significant number of us are also parents. I am a mother of {three|several