My school in Khan Younis refugee camp was one of my favourite places. I had dedicated teachers and a deep love for learning, so much so that education became my life’s work. But, beyond the joy of learning, school was a place where we, Palestinians, could find a connection to those we could not easily encounter: the Palestinians of the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, the Palestinians of our history, and the Palestinian writers, poets and intellectuals who told our story in exile. Education is how we wove together the fabric of our nation.

Palestinians are renowned for having one of the world’s highest literacy rates. They are often referred to as the best-educated refugees in the world. Education is both part of our national story and a methodology for imparting it.

The annual tawjihi (high school national exam) is a key moment in the Palestinian calendar of liberation. Each year, the announcement of tawjihi results sparks widespread celebrations broadcast across the land, showcasing and honouring the achievements of the top-performing students. The euphoric moment transcends individual success, serving as a collective affirmation of our students’ ability to persevere and excel despite the relentless challenges imposed upon them.

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In the summer of 2024, for the first time since 1967, there was no tawjihi exam in Gaza. There were no celebrations.

Israel’s decimation of the education system in Gaza has caused immense pain and despair among hundreds of thousands of children and young people. Yet, the desire for education is so enduring among Palestinians that even amid genocide, they do not stop trying to learn.

When thinking of this indomitable spirit, I think of my cousin Jihan, a self-employed civil society worker with an MA in diplomacy and international relations. She and her three daughters have been living in a tent in al-Mawasi for the past 10 months. Her husband, a doctor, and their son were forcibly disappeared by the Israeli military in the early days of the genocide.

While living in deplorable conditions in the displacement camp, she and her daughters decided to help students access their education despite the unfolding calamity. With the help of a solar panel, they set up a small charging station and a hotspot, where anyone can charge their device and use the internet in exchange for a small fee.

Two of their regular visitors are relatives of my husband: Shahd, a multimedia student, and her brother Bilal, a medical student. They used to study at al-Azhar and Al-Aqsa universities, respectively, but the Israeli army destroyed both. Last year, they joined an online learning initiative launched by the academic authorities in Gaza to enable the 90,000 university students to complete their higher education.

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Shahd and Bilal told me they have to walk for hours to reach Jihan’s charging station so they can access course notes. Every time they leave their tent for the journey, they embrace their family tightly, aware they may not return. Their parents are concerned, especially for Bilal, because young men are often the targets of drone strikes. To help keep him safe, Shahd sometimes makes the journey alone, carrying both her and her brother’s phones to charge and download coursework.

The queues are long, with hundreds of young people waiting in line to access enough power to charge a laptop or phone. The internet signal is weak so downloads are slow. The whole process sometimes takes a full day.

As the eldest daughter, Shahd dreams of graduating and making her parents proud, bringing a small light into their darkened world. Her father was recently diagnosed with colon cancer, and the family now faces another level of fear and loss, given the collapse of the health system and the genocide.

Shahd told me she clings to the hope that, in some way, through the small victory of graduation, she might transform this harsh reality. She is fully aware of the risks. “With each step, I wonder if I’ll make it back. My dream is to finish my degree, graduate, and find a job to help my family,” she told me.

“I’ve seen people burned, disfigured, evaporated, and even left for stray animals to find. I’ve seen body parts hanging from power lines, on rooftops, or transported by animal-drawn carts or carried on shoulders. I pray this isn’t how I’ll die. I must die in one piece with my mother able to bid me farewell, and to be buried in dignity,” she added.

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Anywhere, the mass killing of students and attacks on schools or universities are a tragedy. But in Palestine, where education is more than a right or a dream, such assaults also target our national identity.

Israel is well aware of that and the destruction of Gaza’s education system has been part of its longstanding strategy to erase Palestinian identity, history, and intellectual vitality.

My generation, too, experienced an Israeli assault on education, albeit much less deadly and destructive. From 1987 to 1993, during the first Intifada, Israel imposed a blanket closure of all universities in Gaza and the West Bank as a form of collective punishment, depriving tens of thousands of students of the right to higher education. At the same time, an Israeli military curfew confined us to our homes every night, from 8pm to 6am. Israeli soldiers were given orders to shoot any violators. Schools were raided, attacked, and shut down for weeks or months at a time.

Despite this violence and disruption, education became an act of resistance. Like the 18,000 other tawjihi students in Gaza in 1989, I studied tirelessly. I obtained the high marks required to be able to pursue a prestigious degree, which typically meant medicine or engineering.

My family was overjoyed. To celebrate my achievement, my father prepared a big pot of tea, bought a box of Salvana chocolates, and rushed to the family diwan in Khan Younis camp, where our family mukhtar served Arabic coffee. People also came to congratulate my mother at home. Yet that fleeting joy quickly turned to despair. With universities shuttered, I was forced to wait five long years, clutching tightly to the dream of continuing my education.

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Mahmoud Darwish was right: Palestinians are afflicted with an incurable disease called hope. And paradoxically, the very restrictions of the occupation during the first Intifada created fertile ground for activism, resistance and community work. In the absence of formal institutions, young people denied university education joined educational committees formed by civil society across Palestine.

We transformed homes, mosques, and community halls into makeshift classrooms. Often, we had to scale walls and sneak through alleyways to reach students without being detected by Israeli soldiers enforcing the curfew. Professors, too, resisted by opening their homes to students, risking arrest and imprisonment to ensure learning continued. Thousands enrolled, studied, and even graduated under these harrowing conditions.

When universities finally reopened in 1994, I was part of the first cohort to start studying, along with six of my siblings. It was a moment of triumph for my family, though it placed a heavy financial burden on my father, who had to pay for tuition for so many of us. The reopening of universities was not just a restoration of education but a reclaiming of a vital part of Palestinian identity and resistance.

The term “scholasticide”, coined by Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi during the 2009 war on Gaza, captures the reality we have faced for decades. Scholasticide is the deliberate obliteration of indigenous knowledge and cultural continuity. It is an attempt to sever the ties between a people and their collective intellectual and historical identity.

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Today, the reality is even graver. All of Gaza’s 12 universities lie in ruins, and at least 88 percent of all schools in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed.

The physical destruction of infrastructure runs in parallel with efforts to obliterate the legitimacy of the institutions which provide education. In late October, Israel effectively banned UNRWA from operating. Given that this UN agency runs 284 schools in Gaza and 96 in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, this ban deals another blow to Palestine’s intellectual future.

Yet, just as we resisted in the past, Palestinians in Gaza continue to resist this systematic erasure of their educational and cultural lifelines. Education is not just a tool for survival – it is the fabric that binds our nation, the bridge to our history, and the foundation of our hope for liberation.

When I think of the immense destruction of Gaza’s education system and all those students defying all odds to continue to study, I remember the lines of Enemy of the Sun, a 1970 poem by Samih al-Qasem, known as the “poet of Palestinian resistance”.

“You may plunder my heritage,

Burn my books, my poems,

Feed my flesh to the dogs,

You may spread a web of terror

on the roofs of my village

O Enemy of the Sun,

But I shall not compromise,

And to the last pulse in my veins,

I shall resist.”

Palestinian students will continue this resistance by walking for hours each day to access their education. This is the spirit of a people who refuse to be erased as individuals, as a nation, as a historical fact, and as a future reality.

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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.