Maha Ali was determined to one day become a journalist and report on events in Gaza. Now she and other students have just one ambition: finding food as hunger ravages the Palestinian enclave.
As war rages, she is living among the ruins of the Islamic University, a once-bustling educational institution that, like most others in Gaza, has become a shelter for displaced people.
“We have been saying for a long time that we want to live, we want to get educated, we want to travel. Now we are saying we want to eat,” the 26-year-old honours student said.
Ali is part of a generation of Palestinians in Gaza – from primary school through university students – who say they have been robbed of an education by nearly two years of Israeli air strikes that have destroyed the enclave’s institutions.
More than 61,000 people have been killed by Israel’s war on Gaza, according to Gaza health authorities. Much of the enclave, which suffered from poverty and high unemployment even before the war, has been demolished.
Palestinian Minister of Education Amjad Barham accused Israel of carrying out systematic destruction of schools and universities, saying 293 of 307 schools have been destroyed completely or partially.
“With this, the occupation wants to kill hope inside our sons and daughters,” he said.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said, according to the latest satellite-based damage assessment in July, 97 percent of educational facilities in Gaza have sustained some level of damage with 91 percent requiring major rehabilitation or complete reconstruction to become functional again.
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“Restrictions by Israeli authorities continue to limit the entry of educational supplies into Gaza, undermining the scale and quality of interventions,” it said.
Those grim statistics paint a bleak future for Yasmine al-Za’aneen, 19, sitting in a tent for the displaced and sorting through books that have survived Israeli strikes and displacement.
She recalled how immersed she was in her studies, printing papers, finding an office and fitting it with lights.
“Because of the war, everything was stopped. I mean everything I had built, everything I had done. Just in seconds, it was gone,” she said.
There is no immediate hope for relief or a return to the classroom.
Israel plans a new Gaza offensive, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that he expected to complete “fairly quickly”, as the UN Security Council heard new demands for an end to the suffering in the Palestinian enclave.
Saja Adwan, 19, an honours student at the al-Azhar Institute who is living in a school turned shelter with her family of nine, recalled how the building where she once learned was bombed.
Her books and study materials are gone. To keep her mind occupied, she takes notes on the meagre educational papers she has left.
“All my memories were there – my ambitions, my goals. I was achieving a dream there. It was a life for me. When I used to go to the institute, I felt psychologically at ease,” she said.
“My studies were there; my life, my future, where I would graduate from.”