This determination to learn in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles and gut-wrenching personal tragedies is a form of resistance.
HIGH school exams (Tawjihi) are a big deal in Gaza. This year’s results were declared by the Palestinian Ministry of Education on Thursday. Despite enduring two years of a live-streamed Holocaust, over 30,000 students sat for the exams — a remarkable statistic for exams that were held entirely online after the Israelis destroyed nearly every educational institution inside the besieged Gaza Strip.
Almost all the students were displaced multiple times over the past two years and could not attend classes in person due to Israel’s wanton destruction of schools and universities and its deliberate targeting teachers and professors. The Israelis made sure to regularly bomb schools that had long become the last resort for displaced Palestinians. The students managed to continue their education through functioning laptops or mobile phones and a working internet connection, even as the Israelis were deliberately destroying telecom infrastructure. They sat in candlelight or under the flashlight of their phones to pore over lessons as the Israelis bombed the electricity infrastructure. They studied on an empty stomach as a full-spectrum siege gripped the enclave and caused a devastating famine that killed hundreds. They broke their backs carrying water in jerrycans for their families and waited in lines for their turn at US-funded “aid” distribution sites, where American and Jewish mercenaries fired at anything that moved. Despite these dangers, they found time to study at night under flimsy tents that kept out neither the chilling wind nor the scorching sun after a long day of hardships.
Yet they triumphed. And how!
Nesma Alnabih, the sister of former Gaza Municipality spokesman, Asem Alnabih, scored 99.4 percent to secure the top rank in Gaza. “She has survived five wars and a genocide, and still emerged at the very top,” Asem wrote on Twitter, celebrating his sister’s success.
Malak Ashour was displaced eight times during the course of the genocide and still triumphed with 93 percent, while sheltering in a tent in southern Gaza. “These two years were full of despair, destruction, starvation, and bombardment. I will never forget what we went through,” Malak told Quds News Network. “There were no books, not even the energy to study. We lived in constant fear, fear of death, fear of more displacement, fear for an unknown future, and fear that everything we studied might go to waste.”
Many students could not celebrate their success with their loved ones as they were martyred during the course of the genocide.
Nesma studying during the ongoing genocide. She topped the Gaza high school exams with 99.4 percent. Photo: Asem Alnabih.
Hussam al-Masri was martyred in the double-tap strike on Nasser Hospital in August that killed six journalists, including Maryam Abu Daqqa. Hussam’s daughter, Shaza al-Masri, could not hold back her tears after cracking the exams with 92.3 percent.
Nour Eyad dedicated her success to her martyred brother. “I thank Allah for giving me the strength to study and achieve high results. I studied amid the ruins, in a tent, at a time when there was no food and no internet. The situation was miserable for months, and Israel’s killing of my brother made everything even harder,” she told QNN. “I dedicate this success to my brother’s soul.”
She added, “I remember wishing I could have a piece of chocolate or a bit of chicken when I was exhausted from studying, while the bombing was happening so close above our heads. There were many challenges, but we overcame them.”
Nour’s experience of studying for hours on an empty stomach in an enclave deprived of food and water because she and her people are treated as expendable in a land coveted by the Jewish state for Jewish-only settlements is familiar to every Palestinian student in Gaza.
While Nour lost her brother and Shaza her father, some students were martyred before they graduated high school. Doha Nazmi Abu Dalal secured 96.7 percent, but she never got to celebrate her success. Doha was martyred with 18 members of her family in an Israeli attack on the Nusseirat refugee camp on October 29 — the day Israel violated the so-called “ceasefire” in a night of intense bombing that killed 104 Palestinians, including 46 children.
Over the past 25 months, the Israelis have slaughtered more than 16,000 students and over 750 teachers in Gaza.
The high school exam results are a testament to the remarkable resilience of Palestinian students in Gaza. They were displaced multiple times, endured crushing hunger and thirst, mourned the martyrdom of family members and friends, could not attend classes, and managed to learn as best they could using spotty internet connections on phones and laptops, which had to be charged at the very few available charging stations.
Just as countless vile lies have been told about Palestinians over the past century to justify the existence of the Jewish state on stolen Arab lands, the propaganda portraying the Arab native as barbaric and illiterate in contrast to the “enlightened” European Jew has been fully discredited over the past two years.
Few, if anyone at all, now believe the egregious lies of Zionist propagandists, such as Ben Shapiro, who infamously remarked that “Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage,” and Bret Stephens, of the “disease of the Arab mind” fame. The whole world has now seen who bombs schools, universities, libraries, and hospitals alike, and who strings together the tattered pages of their notebooks on an empty stomach to successfully pass exams in the furnace of a Holocaust. The world has also witnessed the diseased minds that film TikToks while shooting children in their genitals and while raping their parents.
This determination to learn in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles and gut-wrenching personal tragedies is a form of resistance. While the Israelis tried to erase the entirety of the Gaza Strip and incinerate all of its 2.3 million inhabitants, its children quietly took root and grew despite the rubble around them. As the Israelis have discovered over the past two years, it is impossible to uproot such a tradition of resistance.
c. Palestine Will Be Free
