Before fall 2023, fourteen-year-old Zain Abbas lived in a four-story home in the northern Gaza City neighborhood of al-Saftawi. He was a good swimmer, training three times a week at his local swimming club. He enjoyed school, and was particularly good at math.
Today, Zain wakes up every day under the thin canvas of a makeshift tent in western Khan Yunis, sharing the cramped space with his entire family. Each morning, he hoists empty water jugs onto his shoulders and walks long distances to a water truck, where he waits in line for hours in the scorching sun to fill them.
“Sometimes I have to fight my way to the front,” he says, “because if the barrel runs dry before it’s my turn, my family won’t have water.”
Zain, who wants to become a veterinarian “to treat animals because they can’t speak for themselves,” should have started ninth grade this fall. Instead, the teenager’s days are filled with chores, water lines, and the gnawing uncertainty of a life interrupted. Rather than days filled with school bells, cartoons, and playgrounds, children in Gaza like Zain are facing a reality defined by hunger, displacement, and survival. For two years now, Israel has continuously bombed Gaza and instituted a total blockade of the region—an intensification of its previous blockade, which has been in place since before Zain was born. Since October 7, 2023, the enclave’s schools have been shuttered, and its playgrounds have since turned to rubble.
“All I dream of is for this war to end so I can swim again,” Zain says, his eyes fixed on the horizon of a life he says he barely remembers.
According to The Guardian, 745,000 children and university-age students have been out of school for two years, as “more than 90 percent of school buildings, 79 percent of higher education campuses, and 60 percent of vocational training centres have been damaged or destroyed.” Many of the schools that remain standing in Gaza have since been converted into shelters for displaced Palestinians. The United Nations has also used these shelters as “temporary learning spaces” to provide basic lessons for children. Still, most school-age children in these shelters continue to be stripped of their access to education.
The United Nations-backed International Food Security Phase Classification now estimates that based on the rapid expansion of famine in Gaza, at least 132,000 children under the age of five will experience the effects of acute malnutrition through June 2026. As of the beginning of this month, at least 150 children have died from acute malnutrition since the start of the war, and more than 51,000 have begun receiving treatment for malnutrition. Records from August 15—days before famine was officially declared for the first time in Gaza—attribute 107 child deaths to malnutrition across a combined thirty-four months, whereas the current death toll has risen by forty three in less than eight weeks.
The famine’s long term consequences will be devastating: starvation is known to stunt adolescent development, increase risk of chronic disease and lifelong health issues, and potentially even change how survivors’ genes function. In September, the U.N. Human Rights Council compiled a legal analysis of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and reported that “the widespread and systematic targeting of children is part of a strategy to destroy the biological continuity and future existence of the Palestinian group in Gaza, thus part of the intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.”
Zain’s mother, who was an English teacher before the war began in October 2023, says she sees the toll the war has taken on her son.
“He was always a bright, happy boy,” she says. “Now, he’s angry, frustrated. He asks me, ‘Why are we living? What’s the point?’ ”
The teenager’s struggles are compounded by the disappearance of his father, Jameel, who travelled back to their al-Saftawi home in northern Gaza last month to retrieve the family’s belongings and never returned. No one knows his whereabouts, or if he is alive. Without his father, Zain has been forced to grow up even faster; as the only boy left in the family, he tries to help his mother by selling nutritional supplements on the street, bringing home what little money he can to pay for food.
He’s also been knocking on doors at the remaining local schools and learning centers, desperately searching for a way back into a classroom to continue his education, only to be told there is no space. His mother tries to teach him for an hour each day, but the exhaustion of life in a besieged war zone makes it difficult to do so. “There’s no time for Zain,” she admits, her voice breaking, “and I fear the worst for him.”
Yet Zain still clings to hope. “All I crave,” he says, “is for this war to end and to go back to my home in Gaza.”
His message to the world is simple: “Help us end this war. Help us rebuild Gaza. Give children like me a chance to live again.”