Before war broke out in Gaza, I spent five years teaching English to middle schoolers there. Now I cannot imagine myself returning to teach at schools where students have spent the past year sitting and sleeping on classroom floors with their families, seeking refuge from a relentless assault.
These children were not learning math or language. They were learning the names of Gazan neighborhoods as each was bombed. They were not practicing sports. They were practicing survival, carrying buckets of water for hundreds of feet and running from one classroom to another, from one school to another, from one tent to another, from one city to another, hoping not to be run over by a tank or crushed under bombed-out walls and ceilings.
Across Gaza, hundreds of schools have been turned into shelters, and many of them have been attacked by Israeli forces, who say Hamas fighters use them as command centers. These attacks have killed hundreds of people, according to local health authorities. One Israeli airstrike hit a school in the Nuseirat refugee camp, home to about 12,000 displaced people, for the fifth time in September, killing 18 people.
How can a teacher — me or anyone else — return to teach children and pretend these same places have not been zones of death and suffering? During previous military conflicts in Gaza, it was mainly students who received psychological support. The question of offering support for teachers was rarely raised. But after nearly a year of war, how can traumatized teachers, teachers who may have lost close family members and friends or who even were injured, deal with traumatized students?
How can trauma be treated when it is never-ending? In Gaza there is no post-traumatic stress, because there is never a time without trauma. It was already an environment filled with chronic traumatic stress disorder before this war. After this year, the trauma will grip generations to come. Thousands of children have lost their lives since the Israeli war on Gaza began on Oct. 8, 2023. Others lost body parts. Others lost their parents. Others lost everyone. Over the last year, doctors working in Gaza created a new acronym, W.C.N.S.F.: wounded child, no surviving family.
The last time I was in a school classroom was in November, to take refuge in one in the Jabaliya camp in northern Gaza. I was there with my wife, Maram, and our children, Yazzan, 8; Yaffa, 7; and Mostafa, 4.
Two of Maram’s uncles, as well as her parents and siblings, shared a classroom with four other families. The room was divided into five parts, with Maram’s uncles and parents sharing a somewhat bigger section. We used to eat in their section. It was not more than 27 square feet. The space also contained a 66-gallon water tank, mattresses and kitchenware.
School desks served as partitions to make the tiny rooms and blackboards served the same function in other classrooms. If there were no blackboards, it was probably because parts of them were used for cooking fires. The last time cooking gas trucks entered the north was in October 2023.
In Jabaliya, I remember searching the rubbled streets and lanes of the market for cardboard boxes, usually dirty, or sticks for cooking fires. I would return to the school with something, feeling very accomplished — not as a student or a teacher, but rather as a collector of useful stuff for family survival.
On Nov. 19, before my family and I made our way to the United States, we took a journey toward the southern part of the Gaza Strip, hoping to reach the Rafah border crossing to leave for Egypt. As we reached a checkpoint on Salah al-Din Road, I was detained by the Israeli Army and put in a detention center with dozens of other Palestinians for three days. I was blindfolded, handcuffed and forced to stay on my knees. I was not allowed to speak, or to ask about my family. Upon release I took up another journey, this time to find my wife and kids. I was not sure whether they were still alive.
On the road heading south — anyone moving north would have been shot then — I found them. They were sheltering in another school close to Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah. I joined them and we stayed with two of my wife’s uncles in a tent pitched on the school campus. Rainwater sometimes flooded our tent.
Moving from one school to another as refugees is not like moving up from an elementary school to a middle school. To still live in your own house in Gaza feels like living in a mansion, though it can be dangerous. To live in a classroom feels like living in a hotel room. To live in tents on a school campus feels like living in a hotel lobby.
We eventually made it to Cairo, where in early December I watched a video of the school where we sheltered in Jabaliya being besieged by Israeli tanks and soldiers. It was around that time that a sniper killed one of Maram’s uncles, who was deaf and mute, at the gate of another school in Beit Lahia, where he was sheltering with his wife and their two babies. That school later burned down. It was the same school where Yazzan and Yaffa attended third and first grade before Oct. 7, 2023.
About 625,000 children in Gaza have missed a whole school year because of the war, not to mention the trauma they have suffered. Although in recent weeks the United Nations Relief and Works Agency has been trying to start the new school year inside shelters, the effort is almost pointless given the fact that schools continue to be bombed and Israeli evacuation orders continue to keep people on the move.
While it will take many long years to remove the rubble in Gaza, much less rebuild it, I fear it will take a whole lifetime, if ever, to rebuild a sense of hope in children in a world that has failed them. Governments have been unable to save the children of Gaza and their families, despite a never-ending stream of videos and photos and news reports clearly showing their suffering, day after day.
My eldest sister, Aya, has been complaining to me on the phone lately. It’s never easy to connect with my family in Gaza from my temporary home in Syracuse, N.Y., where I received an appointment as a visiting scholar at Syracuse University. During the short calls, the sound of whirring drones and distant bombing gets mixed with coughing.
“But this is bad for your baby,” I tell her. She is nine months pregnant. Aya barely has had access to fresh food for her entire pregnancy. She, like most Gazans, relies on canned food and some rare and pricey groceries.
Meanwhile, my wife and I prepared our children for their first days at their new American school. We all sat on the couch with my iPad, scrolling down and up through backpacks and water bottles and in a few minutes we placed an order.
If there is to be any hope for the future, the children of Gaza need a better reality, one closer to what I see American children enjoy. They need healthy food and clean water, a safe place to sleep at night. And they need classrooms where they can learn.
Mosab Abu Toha is a poet, a short story writer, an essayist and the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza. His new book of poetry, “Forest of Noise,” is forthcoming from Knopf. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
