Karim Al Masri was just weeks away from graduating, with his final exams due to start Saturday morning, but he had spent the morning filling bags with water, freezing them and selling them to help support his family.
“I should have been studying and preparing for my final exams,” said Al Masri, 18. But more than eight months into the war, “I’m working every day to feed my family and cope with the situation.”
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Education, Al-Masri was one of around 39,000 students in the Gaza Strip who were unable to take their final high school exams, which were due to start on Saturday across Palestine and in Jordan, and will therefore not be able to graduate.
The war has devastated Gaza’s education system, which was already struggling after several wars and escalating tensions since 2008. At least 625,000 children in Gaza are out of education because schools have been closed since the war began in October, just over a month into the new school year, according to UNRWA, the U.N. agency that provides assistance to the Palestinians.
According to UNRWA, which runs many of the schools in the Gaza Strip, after months of Israeli attacks, more than 76 percent of schools in the Strip need to be rebuilt or extensively renovated before they can function. Most of these schools are being used as shelters to house the many displaced families in the Gaza Strip, most of whom are living in dire conditions.
Al-Masri said he had dreamed of studying information technology at the Islamic University of Gaza or the University of Applied Sciences, both of which were destroyed in Israeli bombings. All 12 universities in Gaza were heavily damaged or destroyed in the fighting, according to the United Nations.
Instead of pinning his hopes on returning to school and graduating, he said the war has shifted his priorities, and now he is focused on working to continue supporting his family. While selling ice in the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah, Al-Masri often passes schools, but he said “classrooms have become shelters,” and when he peers inside “I am filled with anguish.”
Islam Najjar, 18, who was also due to take his first final exams on Saturday, said her school in Deir al-Bala, where many Gazans have fled since Israel’s attack on Rafah, has also become a shelter.
“I cannot imagine seeing our schools, the places where we learn, turned into shelters filled with displaced people living in dire conditions,” she said.
“When we return, we won’t see all the same faces,” she said, referring to classmates, two teachers and the principal who died during the war.
Al-Najjar is hopeful about possibly returning to school and graduating, and despite “so many obstacles to everything I want to achieve in Gaza,” she dreams of studying abroad, with her sights set on Harvard or Oxford to study business.
“We were so excited to be in our final year of school and start a new chapter,” said Al-Najjar, the family’s eldest daughter, who had been planning graduation celebrations even before the war began, “but then, of course, the war put an end to everything.”
“Why does the spring of our lives coincide with the decline of our country?” Al-Najjar said. “Is it our fault that we dared to dream?”
Abu Bakr Bashir He contributed reporting from London.
