As war drags on, Gaza’s high school students put their dreams on hold | World news

Karim al-Masri was supposed to start his final exams on Saturday morning, just weeks before his graduation. Instead, he spent the morning filling bags with water to freeze into ice, which he sold to feed his family.

“I should have been studying and preparing for my final exams,” says 18-year-old al-Masri. But more than eight months after the war began, “I spend my days working to support my family and help them cope with the situation.”

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Education, Al-Masri was one of nearly 39,000 students in the Gaza Strip who were unable to take the high school exams scheduled for Saturday in the Palestinian territories and Jordan and will therefore not graduate.

The war has destroyed the education system in the Gaza Strip, which was already several wars and escalations since 2008. According to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine relief, at least 625,000 children in Gaza are unable to attend school. Schools have been closed since the war began in October, just over a month after school started.

More than 76 percent of schools in Gaza need to be rebuilt or extensively renovated in order to be able to operate again after Israel’s months-long offensive, according to UNRWA, the humanitarian agency that runs many schools in the Gaza Strip. Most of these schools have been used as emergency shelters for the many displaced families in Gaza, most of whom live in squalid conditions.

Al-Masri said he dreams of studying information technology at the Islamic University of Gaza or the University College of Applied Sciences – both universities destroyed by Israeli bombings. According to the United Nations, all 12 universities in Gaza have been badly damaged or destroyed by fighting.

Instead of pinning his hopes on going back to school and getting a degree, he said the war has shifted his priorities and he is now focused on working to continue supporting his family. While selling ice cream in his central Gaza town of Deir al Balah, al-Masri said he often walks past his school where “the classrooms have been converted into makeshift shelters,” and when he looks inside, he is “filled with anguish.”

Islam al-Najjar, 18, who was also due to take her first final exam on Saturday, said her school in Deir al Balah, where many Palestinians have fled Israel’s Rafah offensive, had also been converted into a temporary shelter.

“I can’t imagine coming back and seeing my school, a place where we learn, turned into a makeshift shelter full of displaced people living in deplorable conditions,” she said.

“When we return, we will not all see the same faces,” she said, referring to her classmate, two teachers and her principal who were killed during the war.

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Al-Najjar still hopes to go back to school and graduate. Despite the “many hurdles you have to overcome in Gaza to achieve anything,” she says, she dreams of studying abroad. She plans to study business at Harvard University or the University of Oxford.

“I was really looking forward to my last year of school and the beginning of a new chapter,” says al-Najjar, the eldest in her family, who had planned her graduation ceremony before the war began. “But of course the war stopped everything.”

“Why does the spring of our life coincide with the downfall of our country?” asked al-Najjar. “Is it our fault that we dared to dream?”