Next Year Is a Myth…

By Malak Radwan

In the quiet ruins of Gaza, where hope flickers like a candle in the wind, another academic year has passed, leaving behind the shattered dreams of thousands of students. Last January, as a fragile ceasefire briefly held, the Minister of Education spoke of plans to hold high school exams in February. But the necessary tools; electronic devices, the basic infrastructure for assessment, never arrived. Then, like a recurring nightmare, war returned in March, swallowing yet another chance for Gaza’s youth to sit for their exams.

October should have been the month of crisp notebooks, the rustle of final exam preparations, the nervous excitement of high school seniors in Gaza dreaming of universities. Instead, it became the month of rubble, of shelters, of names written on mass graves.

My brother Mohannad was supposed to be a first-year engineering student by now, following in our father’s and eldest brother’s footsteps. Instead, he is suspended in limbo; one of thousands of Gaza’s high school students whose academic lives were frozen when the genocide tore through their classrooms, their textbooks, their futures.

Gaza’s schools were not just buildings; they were vessels of hope. Now, some lie in ruins, reduced to skeletons of twisted metal. Others, still standing, have become shelters for families who no longer have homes. The blackboards that once held equations and essays now display the names of the missing. The science labs smell of sweat and displacement instead of chemicals. 

The 2023 academic year was never completed. The 2024 exams were postponed indefinitely. For students like Mohannad, time has split into two parallel realities: the one where he should already be a university student, designing bridges and buildings, and this one, where he sits in a tent, reviewing old notes by candlelight, praying for a miracle.

Around him, an entire generation is stuck in the same purgatory. The brightest minds in Gaza; future doctors, engineers, and poets, are now experts in survival instead of calculus, in recognizing bomb sounds instead of chemical formulas.

Next year could be another war. Next year, the university itself might be gone. Next year. 

But next year is a myth in Gaza.

Still, they try. In the shelters, in the tents, between the sounds of drones and explosions, you’ll see them huddled over textbooks, sharing phone screens for online lessons when the internet works, trading notes like sacred texts. They clutch education like a lifeline, the last proof that they are more than just survivors, more than just statistics.

While students elsewhere stress over grades and college applications, Gaza’s seniors stress over whether their exam centers will be bombed before they can sit for tests. While global universities debate academic freedom, Gaza’s students pray for the freedom to have academics at all.

The genocide didn’t just steal their homes. It stole their time.

They should be in a lecture hall. Instead, they’re in a tent, listening to the distant thunder of warplanes, wondering if he’ll live long enough to see a classroom again.

Gaza’s students are not just waiting for peace.

They are waiting for time itself to restart.

And the world watches, does nothing, and moves on to the next headline.

Now, as the West Bank celebrates another year of published high school results, Gaza’s students are left in the shadows, their futures suspended. For the second consecutive year, an entire generation has been denied the simple dignity of completing their education, of holding a diploma that might open doors to universities, careers, and a life beyond the rubble.