we are not numbers
emerging writers from Palestine tell their stories and advocate for their human rights
He receives his math lesson in a space where students and displaced families are crowded together.
Shahid’s brother Zain helps obtain food for his family while also attending lessons in a classroom sheltering displaced families. Photo: Shahed AbuAlShaikh
When my 13-year-old brother Zain entered his first class for seventh grade at Al-Shati Preparatory School, he found himself in a tiny classroom with 25 students and two sheltered families, all attending a math lesson together.
“We were sitting on the floor, on our knees, with our notebooks in front of us,” he told me. “Every time we wanted to write, we had to bend down. There wasn’t enough space because we were all packed together, and our backs started to hurt.
“We couldn’t focus during the math lesson because there was a baby crying, and his mother was trying to calm him down, but he wouldn’t stop, so the teacher paused the lesson.”
Zain said that the teacher hangs a board on the classroom door to serve as the blackboard. Students sit on a cold floor, surrounded by the belongings of the displaced families. This classroom is the only one in the school partially allocated for teaching; other students must wait outside in the yard until their turn comes to use half of the room.
The education sector in Gaza was once bustling, diverse and full of vitality, with a population that was highly educated despite being under siege. The school system included both private and public schools and those supported by UN agencies. Gaza’s prestigious local universities, such as Al-Azhar and the Islamic University, educated and supported generations of students in many scholarly disciplines.
Since the beginning of the October 2023 war on Gaza, education has no longer looked the same. It is not by chance that the school and university systems in Gaza were targeted by the Israeli regime; this destruction served as a way to tie the fate of the next generation of children and youth to highly constrained opportunities for education or the development of awareness.
The Gaza Strip has lost most of its identity and familiar scenes have been utterly transformed. Every non-razed institution including hospitals, shops, and schools doubles as a shelter for the displaced and the vulnerable.
The priority of Gaza’s people shifted from the cultivation of education and culture to the immediate needs for food, shelter and safety. Parents had no choice but to occupy themselves with procuring food from charity kitchens and protecting their children from the dangerous hazard zones across the Strip that put them at risk of death. Seeking the services of the best Gazan teachers and/or language schools to help them master English became largely unattainable.
As a result, there is little to no room to be concerned for education; a huge sector of life in the Gaza Strip has nearly disappeared. For most children who had begun school before October 2023, schools became nothing more than memories of learning and childhood friendships.
Schools transformed into one of the few opportunities for makeshift shelters for the many families fleeing bombardment and danger zones. The ones that remain are cramped with the arrival of displaced families. Each classroom has become a confined rectangular space that holds around three or four families and all of their belongings. They have merged into a single space no larger than 7 meters (23 square feet) for families and students alike.
We must remember that this reality is a violent imposition of war and genocide; Gaza, once so much richer in opportunities for advancement of culture and awareness, has been reduced to the most extreme scenes of hardship.
After the announcement of a ceasefire in October 2025 and the beginning of its first phase, Gaza began a new attempt to rebuild its institutions, including education. Students had lost years of learning between the queues for food and water and never-ending dangers of bombardment, snipers, and multiple displacements.
Rebuilding is an attempt to be able breathe again and revive vibrant education previously available in Gaza. Schools and universities have sought to resume teaching as quickly as they could in an attempt to make up for lost time, in spite of all of the remaining obstacles across the Gaza Strip.
I learned about the perspective of displaced families sheltering in schoolrooms through a short conversation with one of the displaced women in Zein’s classroom. She explained how, since classes resumed, there has been a greater restriction of movement and her family’s already limited privacy has become virtually non-existent. She added that the presence of students forces them into silence, depriving them of even the freedom to speak.
It may be hard to imagine a classroom and a home merging into one busy rectangle that seeks to accommodate various displaced families and students of an entire school. Everyone becomes a fragment of themselves: you, your clothes, the modest makeshift kitchen all dissolve into each other along with privacy and comfort. To simply be human suddenly requires levels of patience and fortitude that are superhuman.
This rectangular space of the school with displaced families and schoolchildren packed together into a tiny encampment is a microcosm of all of life in Gaza. There is no respite from our suffering or space to pause, reflect, even heal from all of the layers of devastation. Let alone to learn seventh-grade math lessons.
