Graphic by Christopher Cruz
When I returned to the Islamic University in Gaza City in January 2026 after nearly a year, I did not return to attend a lecture. I came back to see whether the place still existed at all.
In Gaza, where schools have been bombed to rubble by Israeli forces, education is no longer an institutional right. It has become a personal, daily practice—something necessary for survival. For me, writing has become the most important of these practices, a lifeline I hold onto every day to remind myself that I am still learning, still alive, and still able to turn this harsh reality into words amid all the chaos around me.
One early morning in June 2025, amid a merciless famine, I was searching for food for my family by braving one of what we here call “death traps”: aid distribution centers run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a U.S. company, at which Israeli forces, Israeli armed gangs, and American private contractors, would shoot at civilians seeking food. I stood with a group of strangers, many of whom are no longer alive. We were taking cover behind a small sand barrier from Israeli snipers and their indiscriminate gunfire, waiting for the moment to move, when one of them said, as if stating something obvious: “We have to document how we live, so the world knows what we’re going through.”
His words stayed with me. That night, when I was lucky enough to return alive, I remembered what he said. I remembered that I loved writing, and that I was studying English translation, a field that taught me how to write and document, and yet I had never thought about publishing anything. That night, I wrote my first article, which was published in Mondoweiss.
Since then, I have tried to document everything we live through. I’ve written about experiences like life as a student, farming during war, cooking with wood, resorting to salt water for sustenance, evacuation orders, and surviving winter. It has never been easy. Ever since my roof became a flimsy fabric, nothing has been normal. I can’t continue my university studies remotely because there is no stable electricity or reliable Internet to attend lectures, write, or translate. I move between cafés around the camp where I live in al-Mawasi, in southern Gaza. Many of the cafés are powered by solar panels, and rely on the sun showing its face for lights, appliances, Wi-Fi, heating, and cooling. I find myself a table and imagine I am in my old room in Rafah, sitting at my large white desk, imagining my mother walking in to place a cup of mint tea beside me. Instead, I’m at a table that changes every day depending on where electricity is available in the camp. A simple Samsung Galaxy A50 phone has become my only window to the world. I have to borrow my friend’s laptop when he’s not using it, because mine was destroyed under the rubble of our old home.
Hassan Herzallah
The author’s laptop, which was destroyed during Israeli bombardment.
I clearly remember the moment I received my first payment for writing and documenting. I was helping my mother knead dough when I received a message from the outlet that had published my work for the first time. I felt a strange mix of pride and healing. The amount of money was not the most important part; what mattered was the feeling that this effort, this pain, and these words could turn into something tangible—a feeling that I was still able to produce, to be more than just a displaced person controlled by the circumstances of war around me, that I had, even partially, challenged those circumstances.
In January, after several months of the so-called ceasefire, some of my university friends contacted me and suggested we meet at our school, the Islamic University, which Israel bombed multiple times and destroyed. I hadn’t visited the campus since February 2025—and hadn’t studied there since October 5, 2023.
When I entered through its gate, there was no guard or students crowding the entrance, and the corridors were silent. I walked carefully, not out of fear of the stones, but because I no longer knew how to walk in a place that no longer recognized itself. The walls had collapsed, revealing what had once been inside: lecture halls, offices, places where we used to discuss translations, deadlines, and exams. Some of the buildings still standing were filled with the tents of displaced families.
Hassan Herzallah
The Islamic University in Gaza City, January 2026.
There were only two buildings still in use for educational purposes, in which a small number of students were trying to study practical courses amid the rubble. There, we saw my friend Fathi, an engineering major who, along with a few other students, comes to the university once a week for a single practical session taught by a professor. They sat around a cracked table with simple tools in front of them, trying to treat the class as if everything were normal. Fathi has lost most of his family during the genocide; he told me that his studies had become his only way to distract his mind from what he had witnessed over the past two years.
All of my friends are trying to continue their studies in different ways, balancing displacement, work, and the daily search for basic survival necessities with their desire not to lose their connection to education. One friend told me how he goes to a neighbor’s house every day simply because the Internet connection there is slightly better. He downloads as many recorded lectures as he can onto his phone, then returns to his tent to watch and study them throughout the day. “We search for signals more than we search for classrooms,” he told me.
At that moment, I understood something I had not fully realized before: Education here is no longer an institution. It is no longer a building or a course schedule. It has become a constant attempt to hold onto one’s mind in a place that pushes you toward collapse every day.
Before the war, education was something simple and straightforward, we often took it for granted. Today, accessing education depends on finding a quiet corner in a crowded tent, a temporary seat in a cafeteria with electricity, or waiting a long time for a weak Internet signal.
Sometimes I sit for hours in front of the screen, waiting for the internet signal to be strong enough to send an email to an editor abroad or to receive a file to translate. At the same time, I would often open a recorded lecture, take quick notes, then return to finishing the translation or writing the article. There is no longer a clear separation between studying and working. Both have become part of a single routine in which I apply what I have learned to the reality I am living, and learn from that reality how to use the skills I have studied. In these moments, I am not only working, but also learning and applying my studies to real life.
But my path has not been filled with recognition or quick results. With every article that was rejected, and every email that went unanswered, I learn another lesson. Sometimes I put myself at risk just to find a place with electricity and Internet; I move between locations far away from each other in the camp and across Khan Yunis and wait for hours just to open my inbox. On some days, the only email I receive is a short message from an editor saying they were on leave from work, or that the piece would not be published. Though I feel frustrated in these moments, they also teach me patience, discipline, and how to continue despite repeated small disappointments. This experience, with all its rejection and waiting, has become part of my informal education—a lesson in perseverance in a world that gives you nothing easily.
Freelancing gives me a role to organize my time because there is an editor waiting and an article that I have to submit. This discipline is not only a professional skill; it is also a way to protect my mind from falling into chaos. I am learning how to live, and at the same time learning how to write about this life.
Education here did not stop. It simply changed its form. In Gaza today, we do not go to education. We practice it every day to stay alive.