Two years later, Gaza’s young voices echo from afar

Mushfiq Ahmed 

KARACHI, PAKISTAN (MNTV) – On October 7, life in Gaza changed forever. The bombings that followed ripped through homes, schools, and hospitals, reducing entire neighborhoods to dust. But for thousands of young Palestinians who once filled Gaza’s classrooms and university halls, the devastation is not only about destroyed buildings — it is about shattered memories, interrupted dreams, and the unbearable weight of leaving loved ones behind.

Today, some of those students are continuing their education in Pakistan. Their bodies are safe, but their minds remain trapped in Gaza’s rubble, haunted by the voices of family and friends still living under siege.

Haya, 21, from Deir al-Balah, still remembers the December night when an Israeli airstrike flattened her friend’s house. “I felt the ground shake. The sound was deafening. I thought I would die,” she says. It was that night she realized she could not stay in Gaza if she wanted a future.

Now studying clinical psychology in Pakistan, she lives with survivor’s guilt. “I eat while my family starves. I sleep without fear while they wake up to bombs. My mind is in two places at once — here in the classroom, and there, in Gaza, under the rubble.”

Her voice cracks when she recalls the last phone call with her younger brother: “He said, don’t worry about us. Just succeed in your studies. But how can I, when every day I think I might lose them?”

Another student, Ahmad, 20, from Beit Lahia, describes the weeks before he left. “Random bombings, every hour. The smell of dust and fire. I lost cousins, neighbors, friends. In Rafah, when we heard the ground invasion was coming, we thought it was our last day alive.”

He left with only a backpack and the clothes on his back. His memories of Gaza are filled not with laughter or ordinary youth, but with funerals. “The ground was never safe. You never knew where the next rocket would fall. Even sleeping felt dangerous.”

Now at a Pakistani university, Ahmad finds peace in lectures and textbooks, but admits the silence is heavy. “Back home, there was always noise — drones, bombs, cries. Here it is quiet. Too quiet. Sometimes the silence scares me more.”

‘Our house disappeared in seconds’

Masarra, 23, from northern Gaza, left with her family in May 2024, just before the Rafah border closed. “Our house was destroyed on the third day of the genocide,” she recalls. At the time, her father, a surgeon, was away on hospital duty, leaving her mother to shield the children from the thunder of explosions.

“We moved to my grandmother’s house, but even there we weren’t safe. One evening, a building only a few blocks away collapsed from an airstrike. The screams… the dust… we thought we would be next.”

Eventually, her family joined the mass exodus to southern Gaza. “We left everything — friends, memories, childhood streets. My parents kept working in hospitals, treating the wounded while hiding their own fear.”

Today, she studies at a Pakistani university, but her notebooks are filled with more than assignments. “I write down the names of relatives we lose, so I never forget. Almost every week, someone is martyred. Someone is buried. It feels like I am carrying two lives at once — the one I live here, and the one I lost there.”

‘No dignity left for women’

For the women of Gaza, the suffering is layered. Beyond the bombs, there are the silent struggles of hygiene, privacy, and dignity.

“Imagine your mother giving birth with no anesthesia. Imagine your sister hiding during her menstrual cycle with no pads, no bathroom, no clean water,” says Laila, 22, from Khan Younis. “That is what women in Gaza endure every day. Even dignity is denied to us.”

When she left through what Israel called a “safe passage,” she found only terror. “The corridor was not safe. Planes flew above us. We walked past bodies. My little brother cried the whole way.”

At her university in Pakistan, she tries to focus on her studies but struggles with language barriers and memories. “Education is good here. Professors help us. But at night, I dream of Gaza — the voices, the smoke, the fear. It never leaves me.”

Perhaps the hardest blow for many students was watching Gaza’s universities vanish in plumes of smoke. Their classrooms — once buzzing with ambition and debate — are now ruins.

“We studied under siege, under bombs, because we believed education was our resistance,” says Khaled, 24, who left Gaza after 150 days of war. “Now those classrooms are gone. But we will not stop learning. If we survive, we will rebuild.”

For him, every lecture in Pakistan is an act of defiance. “They destroyed our homes, our schools, but not our will. Education is how we fight back.”

“Every grade I get is for my brother, my mother, my friend under the rubble,” says Haya. “I want to show the world we are survivors. We are students. We are Palestine.”