Words and photos by Dina Wadi
“Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.” – Nelson Mandela
Many believe the toughest challenge a student might face is a difficult exam or a strict teacher. But somewhere in the world, a child walks to school each morning carrying a handful of flour mixed with sand in his backpack instead of books, hoping to help feed his family. At night, he studies by the dim glow of a candle inside a worn tent, with explosions echoing from the land, sea, and sky. Not far away, a young university student follows her lecture on a battered phone, despite hours of power cuts.
This is not a scene from a tragic novel. It is everyday life in Gaza, where people believe words can protect them when walls cannot, and where learning is a daily battle only lost by those who stop dreaming.
Here, houses may be destroyed, schools burned, and diplomas buried under the rubble, but minds that cling to education never surrender.
When war engulfed the city on October 7, 2023, it claimed the lives of thousands of students and teachers. They were not numbers on a list, but people with dreams and stories. Lecture halls became silent ruins, as if the laughter and questions that once filled them had scattered into the air.
Schools and universities were no longer places of learning; they had become targets. Many were flattened, and others were turned into shelters for thousands of displaced families. Desks became beds for mothers and children, and the walls that once held class schedules and students’ work now stood as silent witnesses to lives stripped of their normalcy, while classrooms filled with mattresses and blankets that wrapped around their hungry bodies and embraced their exhausted souls.
Yet, in the midst of destruction, siege, and hunger, there is always an empty seat in the heart waiting for the next lesson, a current of hope that refuses to die.
I hear it in the voices of mothers inside worn canvas tents, teaching their children the lessons they have missed. I see it in the eyes of university students sitting on sidewalks, clutching their phones or laptops charged at small solar-powered shops, straining to catch a weak internet signal from a router fixed to a lamppost, just to take an exam or attend an online class. Between the noise of traffic and the scent of dust, a scene unfolds more powerful than any lecture hall: the pure determination to keep going.
I see it every day in my younger sister, Aseel. She had dreamed of winning a scholarship to study medicine abroad, a dream built over years of dedication, sleepless nights, and top grades. The war shattered it, stealing an entire academic year. She was heartbroken at first, but rose again, enrolling in an online Artificial Intelligence program and completing her first year with distinction, despite blackouts, poor internet, the weight of the blockade, and the ache of hunger. I have watched her study by the light of her phone, in the cold of night, with explosions in the distance, guarding her dream as if it were the last piece of herself the war could not take.
There were days when survival came before study. With no gas to cook and no wood to burn, people made fires from whatever they could find — sometimes even schoolbooks. Yet there were also those who bought stacks of books from street vendors, not to read immediately, but to protect them from being burned, saving them for the day light would return to the classrooms.
For many outside Gaza, just hearing its name might bring to mind headlines of conflict, tragedy, and famine. But behind those headlines are students like Aseel, teachers volunteering in tents, and parents selling their last possessions to buy a single book. Behind them stands a community that knows education is the bridge between the ashes of today and the hope of tomorrow.
This is Gaza, where walls fall but words remain, where trees wither yet letters bloom again. This is Gaza, where our passion for learning is our pride, our struggle, and our way of speaking to the future. We will carry our pens as we carry the keys to our homes, believing both will open the door of return, and to the brighter tomorrow we deserve.
