High school students in Gaza… dreams postponed

“Today I live in a classroom where I was supposed to take the high school certificate exams, but because of the war of genocide that the Israeli occupation has been waging for about nine months, I and all the other high school students in Gaza Strip could not take the exams,”  Doaa Akram, a student from Gaza Strip, said with eyes full of tears over the lost dream of completing her high school study.

Doaa sorrow was not only over the loss of her own dreams, but also over the loss of the dreams of all other students who were impatiently awaiting for the exams and over the destruction of the future of the young generation in Gaza Strip due to the occupation’s aggression.

“Due to the loss of gas and firewood, there were times when I was unfortunately forced to burn a number of my books”, Doaa added.

“Before the war, my hope was to study medicine outside the Strip, but today, I only have to wait for the war to end and after the war I may change my plan, because Gaza needs us to rebuild it and I will do my utmost to help it,” she pointed out.

Another student said: “Since the start of the war, and despite the displacement, I have been studying with the hope of passing the exam, as the high school certificate, as they say, is the beginning of the future. I wanted to learn and I wanted many things, but today I lost everything and now I am adapting to being living in a tent under bombing.”

UNRWA Director of Planning Sam Rose noted that the war caused more than half a million children in the Strip to be deprived of education over a period of 8 months, as 39 thousand high school students in Gaza Strip were deprived from taking exams.

The Media Office in Gaza stressed that since the beginning of the war, the occupation had deliberately targeted all the people of Gaza Strip, killing, wounding, and arresting tens of thousands, including thousands of students and education sector workers.

The office indicated that 85 percent of educational facilities were out of service as a result of direct and deliberate bombing by the occupation, which constitutes a major challenge to efforts to resume the educational process after the end of the aggression.

The Palestinian Ministry of Education clarified that secondary school exams were held only in the West Bank and not in the Gaza Strip, and in very complicated circumstances, as the occupation prevented students in the Gaza Strip from taking the exams.

The Ministry stressed that 450 students, who, were supposed to take high school exams, were martyred in the occupation gunfire, including 430 students in Gaza Strip and 20 in the West Bank, while the occupation continues to detain 55 students from the West Bank and deprives them of taking the exams.

Palestinian Prime Minister Muhammad Mustafa affirmed that the start of secondary school exams is a message that education is the first weapon in confronting the occupation and achieving independence.

He noted that the Ministry of Education is making great efforts to compensate the students of the Strip for what they missed previously.

39,000 high school students were not only deprived of their right to education by the ongoing genocidal war, many of them were also deprived of their families and friends, of their homes, of their right to food and to receive treatment. The occupation turned them into forcibly displaced people from one tent to another, in search of safety, although there is no safe place in the Strip.

Instead of devoting themselves to studying, they have become breadwinners for their families, helping to secure their needs, and despite the failure of the international community to oblige the occupation to stop the aggression, and despite the United States continuing to supply the occupation with weapons to claim more lives and inflict wider destruction on the Gaza Strip, those students are still clinging to their dreams, which, they stress, have only been postponed.

Najla Khoury