Sarah Qanan’s goal was to gawk medicine and develop into a doctor.
Two years ago, she was a star pupil preparing for her high school final exams but the outbreak of Israel’s war in Gaza in October 2023 became her dream into ashes.
Today, the 18-year-passe lives in a sweltering tent in the Gaza Strip with her family.
Her most interesting hope now may well be to stay alive.
“We, as students, have suffered from the war. We’ve been suffering for two years. Our lives have been on hold for two years”, Qanan said.
“Our lives, which were filled with good dreams, have turned into nothingness.”
Qanan is one of more than 650,000 Gaza students who have had no access to education since the start of the war, according to the UN adolescence’s agency, UNICEF.
When the war began, schools had been became into shelters for displaced families but Israeli bombings didn’t spare learning spaces.
UNICEF stumbled on that more than 95% of Gaza schools have been partially or totally destroyed.
The Israeli army has demolished all 12 universities in Gaza.
“This war has been extremely difficult for Palestinian society as a whole, especially after the Israeli occupation’s systematic destruction of universities and educational institutions, including public secondary and elementary schools”, said Ibrahim Qanan, Sarah’s father and a Palestinian journalist.
“Even kindergartens were destroyed and crushed under Israeli bulldozers and tanks.”
Nearly 40,000 students had been unable to take university entry exams that largely determine their career prospects.
It’s the first time in decades that the exams weren’t administered in Gaza.
During a six-week ceasefire in January and February, some 600 learning spaces offered classes for around 173,000 adolescence, according to UNICEF. But since March, when Israel ended the truce with a surprise bombardment, nearly half have shut down.
Without functioning schools, younger adolescence also miss out on basic abilities savor reading and straightforward arithmetic.
Some parents attempt to make up for misplaced time by teaching their adolescence.
Hadeel Abu Lihia, a displaced woman in the Muwasi zone in Khan Younis, tries to give her adolescence classes inside their tent but said “their minds are still stuck in the year the war began when they stopped going to school.”
“I am very worried, and this is a huge problem. I fear for my children’s future”, she said.
UNICEF stumbled on that 87% of Gaza schools would require significant reconstruction before they can characteristic again.
Ibrahim Qanan said his family did everything it may to strengthen Sarah’s ambition to gawk medicine, most interesting to survey it coast up in smoke when the war broke out.
“The war horrified us and became our existence the other way up”, the father of six said. “Our dreams and hopes had been buried in the rubble of our house.”
