A doctor friend who came to Gaza with a medical delegation told me he wanted to offer a small act of support to orphaned children.
The word small felt bitterly ironic in a place where even breathing has become heavier than people can endure.
We decided to go together to a school that had recently reopened in Jabalia, in northern Gaza or what is still called a school, because the word itself can no longer carry the truth.
When we arrived, it felt less like entering an educational institution and more like stepping into a chapter from a book about the end of the world.
No walls.
No classrooms.
No blackboards.
Just fewer than twenty tents erected over what was once a children’s playground,
a place once meant for running and laughter,
now repurposed as a shelter for survival,
and a stage where education rises from ashes.
Children sit directly on the ground, as their ancestors once did centuries ago, but while their grandparents learned out of curiosity and hope, these children learn out of sheer necessity to survive.
Small faces scorched by sun and fear.
Eyes older than their years.
Fragile bodies carrying a fatigue no child should ever have to bear.
We asked how many students were enrolled.
The number struck like a bullet to the chest:
1,884 children !!
I thought I had misheard.
I asked again.
The principal repeated it calmly (a calm that felt like surrender ) then opened a thick notebook filled with names.
Names beyond what this space could possibly contain,
and beyond what the heart could bear without breaking.
1,884 children in fewer than twenty tents.
Three shifts a day.
Three hours per child.
Only three days a week.
Even education here has been rationed, fragmented, besieged,
as if knowledge itself requires permits,
as if the mind, too, lives under blockade.
Then we asked about the number of orphans.
We expected a number we could emotionally withstand ..
twenty or thirty … something survivable.
But the number exceeded our ability to stand:
181 orphaned children, in this one school alone !!
181 hearts broken before they could fully form.
181 children returning to tents with no father, no mother, no real roof, no shoulder to lean on.
181 young souls forced to grow too soon, learning fear instead of songs.
One out of every ten children here is an orphan.
One out of every ten carries a void nothing will ever fill.
One out of every ten begins life standing on the edge.
Orphanhood here is not merely the loss of a parent
it is the loss of safety,
the loss of childhood,
the loss of the right to grow slowly.
These children will not grow as they should.
They will grow carrying memories heavier than their ages.
They will grow knowing the world betrayed them early.
And they will carry with them a silent question:
Why us? And why alone?!
And the cruelest truth of all?
This is only one school.
And this is only a fraction of a catastrophe too vast to count.
We no longer count students.
We count orphans.
We measure devastation by the number of children who lost their parents.
We measure the future by the number of hearts broken in childhood.
This is not an education crisis.
This is not a passing tragedy.
This is a crime being committed against an entire generation,
an uprooting of dreams before they are born,
a demolition of a future before it is allowed to breathe.
When we left, there were no words in my chest. only a weight that felt like mourning,
a sorrow unlike any I had known before,
and the realization that we were not standing before a school,
but before a delayed cemetery for children’s dreams.
If 181 orphans exist in a single school,
how many orphans does all of Gaza now carry in its heart?
And how many more childhoods must be buried
before the world understands
that what is happening here
is not a war, but a slow slaughter of an entire people’s future?
#WoundedGaza