Since the first day of the war on the Gaza Strip, its education system has suffered widespread and unprecedented destruction. As a result of Israel’s bombing campaigns, most schools have been destroyed, hundreds of students and teachers have been killed, and hundreds of thousands of children have been deprived of their fundamental right to education.
I am a teacher from northern Gaza. Before the war, I volunteered at a school run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) near my home, while also pursuing my university studies. For me, education was never just a profession—it was a mission.
When the war began and schools shut down, the children in my area suddenly lost everything that connected them to a normal life. There were no classrooms, no books, no schools: only destruction, tents, and repeated displacement. That was when I decided to do whatever I could to help.
In January 2025, I set up a small learning tent next to my destroyed home in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza. The tent was nothing more than a piece of cloth stretched over a few simple poles. But for children who had lost their access to education, it became an entire school.
Within a short time, about 120 students from the first, second, and third grades enrolled in my tent school, with me as their only teacher. The tent couldn’t accommodate all of them at once, so students studied in shifts. We did not have enough books, writing paper, or educational materials, but the children arrived every morning with visible excitement—as if they were holding on to the last pieces of their childhood before the war disrupted it.
The tent was small, and the number of students was overwhelming. I would often have to tell students who came asking to join the lessons that there was no more room. Those moments were among the hardest for me, because I knew that every child to whom I had to say “there is no space” would be another child left without access to education.
Despite all of the hardships, the tent became a space of safety for the children. Inside, they felt a sense of calm away from the surrounding sounds of bombardment. Parents often told me that their children eagerly waited for lesson time, because the tent was the only place that restored even a small sense of normal life.
But even this small refuge was not spared by the war. In mid-May, the Israeli army ordered my family and me to evacuate our home in Jabalia, which stood just a few meters from the educational tent. The order was clear: We had to leave immediately because the area would be bombed within minutes, and staying there would put our lives in danger. This was far from unprecedented, as several similar educational tents were targeted by Israeli airstrikes over the course of the conflict. One of the most notable incidents was the 2024 bombing of Al-Tabaeen School in Gaza City, which had hosted education tents for students. The attack reportedly killed more than 100 people.
We left in a hurry, leaving everything behind. I had to leave the tent, with its blackboard, chairs, and desks, as I fled with my family to western Gaza City. Just two days later, I received heartbreaking news from my students: The educational tent had been burned and completely destroyed.
With the destruction of that tent, 120 children lost their opportunity to continue their education. But there are still options for Palestinian children seeking an education, as other educational initiatives have appeared in the Gaza Strip. One of them is a project known as the “Academies of Hope,” whose flagship center is in the city of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. The initiative was founded by a Palestinian American surgeon named David Hasan. The organization currently provides education to about 9,000 students, and is funded by donations.
For some Palestinian teachers, working at Academies of Hope provides a rare opportunity to earn an income in an economy that has been collapsed by the war. Many of them are recent university graduates—more than 700 teachers have been killed in Israeli airstrikes, resulting in a severe shortage of educational staff in Gaza. Academies of Hope has reportedly coordinated with the Israeli army, providing its information location in the hopes that the schools would not be targeted by airstrikes. But this safety guarantee reportedly comes with conditions, including that the schools not employ any teachers suspected of having affiliation with Hamas, and that all teachers receive Israeli security clearance.
The arrangement also has drawbacks. Recently, the school’s founders have introduced changes to the schools’s curriculum without receiving official approval. Teachers say that some lessons across different subjects have been modified. In the math curriculum, word problems that included examples related to martyrs were removed and replaced with questions about football. In Arabic language classes, texts discussing political resistance were reportedly removed and replaced with texts deemed less inflammatory. In Islamic studies courses, some passages from the official state curriculum set by the Palestinian Ministry of Education have been replaced with texts about the life of the Prophet Muhammad and his interactions with Jewish communities.
Critics of the Academies of Hope point out that these changes were implemented without the approval of the Palestinian Ministry of Education, and that the academy operates without an official license from the ministry. While some believe that any educational initiative can help children regain part of their lost education after years of war, others argue that the future of education in Gaza should focus on rebuilding destroyed schools and supporting the official Palestinian education system—rather than creating institutions outside its supervision.
I hope that Israeli forces will soon withdraw from the northern Gaza Strip so that it becomes a safe area, and I can return with my students. I plan to rebuild the educational tent so my students will be able to study there again, and I can be reunited with them.
Teaching, for me, is not just a profession—it is my life.