In Gaza, education is a daily act of quiet resistance

This article In Gaza, education is a daily act of quiet resistance was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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In a corner of a displacement camp in Al-Mawasi, in southern Gaza, Alaa carefully tapes a sheet of white paper onto a worn wooden board. Dust moves through the air as the wind blows across the camp, where noise and movement rarely stop.

Around her, other tents stretch across the sandy ground of the camp, where thousands of displaced families now live. Children move between the narrow paths separating the tents, while the distant sound of generators and conversation fills the air.

Just a week before the war began in October 2023, Alaa, a 23-year-old fine arts student at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza, worked inside the university’s art studio, surrounded by paints and materials as she planned her graduation project — a collage made by assembling different materials on a single surface. Today, after being displaced during the war, she is trying to rebuild that project using simple materials gathered from friends and a few belongings she managed to retrieve from beneath the rubble of her family’s bombed home.

“When I lost my tent and the materials I used for painting, I felt like I had lost a big part of my soul,” Alaa said. “At first, I lost my passion, but not my hope. Later I tried to start again with whatever I could find, and with support from friends.”

What Alaa is doing is not unusual. Across Gaza, students are trying to continue their education under extraordinary circumstances. Universities have been damaged or destroyed, classrooms reduced to rubble, and electricity and internet connections are often unreliable.

Yet many students keep studying — sometimes inside tents, sometimes among ruins.

Education in Gaza is no longer simply an academic path. For many students, it has become a daily act of quiet resistance. Not because students are making political statements, but because continuing to learn under these conditions becomes a way of refusing erasure — of their futures, their identities and their right to education.

After more than two years of devastation in Gaza, the education system is on the verge of collapse. International estimates indicate that more than 97 percent of schools in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, and more than 12 universities across the territory have been severely affected or rendered unusable. This destruction has been caused by deliberate Israeli airstrikes and military operations, in an attempt to erase educational progress.

In many cases, schools have been turned into shelters for displaced families rather than places for learning. Some students now study in temporary spaces inside tents, damaged homes or online, without the tools they need to learn.

Before the war, tens of thousands of university students attended Gaza’s universities and colleges. Today, many of those institutions lie in ruins. Still, some students are trying to rebuild their academic lives in unconventional ways.

Ahmed, a 22-year-old fourth-year medical student, expected to spend this year in clinical training inside hospitals. Under normal circumstances, medical students spend their final years rotating through hospital departments and operating rooms, learning directly from doctors and patients.

But the reality in Gaza today is very different.

“Becoming a doctor in Gaza today means carrying a heavy responsibility toward your community,” Ahmed said. “Doctors here don’t only face medical challenges — they also work in extremely difficult conditions with limited resources.”

With hospital training often impossible, Ahmed and his classmates have developed alternative ways to keep learning.

“We discuss medical topics and clinical scenarios with each other as if we were in hospital rounds,” he said. “We ask questions and exchange ideas. It cannot replace real clinical training, but it helps us keep our clinical thinking alive.”

In some cases, students also find themselves learning inside field hospitals set up in tents. Gaza’s health care system has been pushed to its limits during the war, with hospitals overwhelmed by patients and many medical facilities damaged or operating under emergency conditions. For medical students like Ahmed, this reality has turned learning into something inseparable from the crisis unfolding around them, where temporary facilities become spaces for both treatment and learning.

Cooperation between students has become essential to continuing their studies.

“We share books and study materials, and whenever someone manages to get lecture notes or summaries, they send them to everyone,” Ahmed said. In this way, studying becomes more than an individual effort — it turns into a form of mutual aid, where students rely on one another to fill the gaps left by the collapse of institutions.

In those moments, he added, they feel like medical students again, despite everything happening around them.

For Alaa, continuing to create art under these conditions often feels nearly impossible. Fine arts education depends heavily on practical studio work and access to materials — many of which disappeared during the war.

Some students were forced to pause their studies temporarily, while others tried to find alternatives with whatever resources were available.

“Instead of canvas, many students now paint on tent fabric,” Alaa said. “Some have even drawn on prayer rugs. The idea is simply to use whatever we can find.”

In one of her recent works, Alaa used pieces of torn tent fabric as part of the artwork and added small fragments of shrapnel she found nearby, attempting to transform remnants of destruction into elements of the painting itself.

The artworks she produces now may not reach the level she once hoped for, but they carry a different meaning.

“For us, art is not just a hobby,” she said. “It is a way to express our feelings, our suffering and our reality.”

“Art is a powerful tool,” she added. “Through it we can show the world what we are going through. As long as art exists, hope still exists.”

Efforts to sustain education are not limited to students. Some university professors are also trying to keep the learning process alive despite the difficult conditions.

Whenever electricity or internet access becomes available, some professors record short lectures and send them to students or answer questions online.

In some cases, small learning meetings are organized — sometimes online, and sometimes in person once or twice a month in temporary locations such as a tent or another relatively safe space. Even with these limitations, these efforts help students stay connected to their education.

With formal institutions largely gone, students increasingly rely on one another. Some share books when they can. Others take turns using internet connections to download materials or submit assignments. Small study groups form whenever conditions allow.

For many students, studying is no longer an individual effort, but a collective attempt to preserve education, one that reflects a form of grassroots organizing in the absence of formal institutions.

In an attempt to support that cooperation, I created an online study group bringing together students from literature and translation programs. Within these groups, students share study materials, exchange lecture notes and help one another keep up with coursework despite electricity cuts, weak internet and the difficult conditions we are living through. What started as a simple effort to stay connected gradually became something larger — a small form of community-building, where students support each other not only academically, but also emotionally.

These small initiatives cannot replace universities or classrooms, but they help students keep going. For many of them, education has become more of a collective effort than ever before.

In Gaza today, resistance does not always appear in the form of protests or slogans. Sometimes it is quieter.

A student reviewing notes by the light of a phone. A group of students sharing a fragile internet connection to submit an assignment. Or an art student completing her project using materials salvaged from the rubble.

For Alaa, painting became a way to continue and to express herself. For Ahmed, studying medicine has become a responsibility toward the future of his community.

As for me, a student and writer in Gaza, writing has become my way of expressing what we feel and trying to make sense of what we are living through.

In a place where universities have been destroyed and institutions have collapsed, continuing to study, write and learn becomes a simple but meaningful act — an attempt to keep the future alive even in the most difficult circumstances. For many students, continuing their education is also a way of refusing the idea that their future can simply disappear with the destruction around them.

The buildings may be gone, but what remains is a form of everyday resistance — one rooted in collective care, shared knowledge and a determination to keep learning despite everything. In that sense, these small acts of studying, sharing and creating are not only about education, but about sustaining a community and a future.

This article In Gaza, education is a daily act of quiet resistance was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2026/03/gaza-education-quiet-resistance/