While comfortable Western audiences debate narratives, positions and what they believe to be true about the whole world, an entire generation in Gaza is being systematically erased, not just by bombs but by a calculated campaign to destroy their future. Their classrooms have been reduced to rubble; their professors are martyred; and their daily reality is a fight for bread and clean water. Yet, from beneath the ruins, their voices are rising in a powerful, unified whisper that says, "We are still here." What will history say of us, who had the luxury to look away?
Key points:
- University students in Gaza have co-authored a powerful anthology, We Are Still Here, documenting their survival under what they describe as an ongoing genocide and "educide."
- The project was born from an international academic solidarity effort led by UK-based Dr. Zahid Pranjol, who provided educational lifelines and therapy to displaced students.
- The writings are raw, first-hand testimonies of loss, starvation and the psychological torment of living under constant bombardment and displacement.
- Students detail the deliberate destruction of Gaza's entire university infrastructure by Israeli forces, forcing education into tents and shelters.
- The anthology serves as both a cry for justice and a profound act of defiance, proving that the intent to erase Palestinian culture and future has failed.
The classroom is now a graveyard
Imagine pursuing a degree while your campus is deliberately bombed into dust. Since October 2023, Israel has engaged in what academics have termed "educide," the systematic destruction of Gaza’s educational infrastructure. Universities lie in ruins. Thousands of students and hundreds of renowned teachers have been killed. In this landscape, the simple act of learning becomes a revolutionary act of survival. Dr. Zahid Pranjol, a professor at the University of Sussex, began a solidarity project in April 2024, sharing academic materials and teaching online.
What started as an educational mission quickly became a psychological lifeline. "Fifty percent you learn English, but the other 50 percent is that you are in touch with someone outside of Gaza who really cares for you," Pranjol explains. This connection fostered a space where traumatized students began to channel their agony into art.
Words written between bombings
The anthology We Are Still Here is not some AI-written narrative. These poems and reflections were scribbled in tents, typed on phones with sporadic internet, and born from moments of sheer terror. Student Obay Jouda describes a world devoid of mercy, a "forest" where no one hears the screaming. "The scream of an empty stomach. The wail of a mourning mother. The howl of a city," he writes. Editor Jacob Norris notes the pieces came in "really on an ad hoc basis... very much in the moment, from the heart, very raw, unfiltered."
For contributor Hada Mohammed Homaid, writing required immense courage. Recalling writing about her martyred brother, she says, "My tears were falling onto the page before even the words were finished." These are not abstract literary exercises; they are forensic evidence of a crime in progress, written by the witnesses who are still alive to testify.
The struggle to remain human
Beyond the physical destruction, the students articulate the deeper, more insidious wound: the war on their very humanity. Saad Aldin Ahmed Muhanna writes with devastating honesty about the moral degradation forced upon a starving population. He describes scenes where people "lunged for [a water bottle] like starving wolves," noting, "Here, you cannot afford decency."
His testimony asks the haunting question we all fear: What would we become under such conditions? "We are not just fighting to survive," Saad writes. "We’re fighting not to lose ourselves completely while trying to survive." This internal battle is the silent, untelevised horror of Gaza’s genocide. It is a deliberate strategy to break a people, to reduce them to a state where their struggle for basic sustenance is used to strip them of their dignity in the eyes of the world.
Rawan Marwan Omar Matar frames their work as a message of "survival and steadfastness." She states, "In Gaza, the lesson doesn't end with the sound of an explosion. It begins again with the first word written on the page."
Their book, now being translated into multiple languages, is a direct rebuttal to the forces that sought to silence them. It proves that while buildings can be leveled, the human spirit, when fueled by truth and solidarity, is indestructible. The world may have grown numb to the statistics, but it cannot so easily dismiss the intimate, poetic and devastatingly personal accounts of those living through the hell we have allowed to be created. Their little eyes are watching, and their pens are recording. History must read their testimony.
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