Ahed Balousha had a single driving ambition as she approached her senior year of high school in Gaza: “To be among the top students in Palestine.” After that, she dreamed of college.

       “I was known among everyone as the persevering person who had a beautiful future,” Balousha said.

       Then came the war.

       Eleven months later, Balousha, 18, is living in a tent with eight family members, and her only ambition is survival. School is a memory darkened by the deaths of at least three former classmates — Aya, Nada and Farah — among thousands of children killed during the war. The school, in the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza, was damaged in a deadly Israeli strike in November and now functions as a shelter for the displaced. The universities Balousha strove to reach are mangled or destroyed.

       Gaza’s 650,000 students are now missing their second year of school, an absence educators say will compound the trauma of war for children and could cause many of them lasting developmental problems. It is another stinging setback for Gaza, where education is highly prized, providing purpose in a desperate, besieged place — and, sometimes, even a way out.

       “We are no longer able to dream,” Balousha said. “Our passion for everything has ended.”

       Even if the war stopped tomorrow, Gaza’s educational system would probably take years to rebuild. Since October, 93 percent of the Strip’s 564 school buildings have “sustained some level of damage,” according to the Global Education Cluster, a research group that works with the United Nations. Eighty-five percent will “either need full reconstruction or major rehabilitation work to be functional again,” the group said in a July report.

       Hundreds of schools have been converted into shelters for the Strip’s nearly 2 million displaced people, but it has not spared them from attack. Two Israeli strikes Wednesday on a school and its surroundings in central Gaza killed at least 18 people, including six workers for the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, according to a Gaza civil defense spokesman and the agency, UNRWA, which said the school had been hit four previous times. Israel said it was targeting Hamas militants.

       Palestinian educators and human rights advocates have accused Israel’s military of intentionally destroying Gaza’s education system, citing repeated Israel Defense Forces strikes on schools, universities and libraries. “It’s not a coincidence that all these schools are being attacked,” said Sulieman Mleahat, the educational director for American Near East Refugee Aid, or Anera, which runs school programs in Gaza.

       “We know the extent of it,” he said. “It’s deliberate.”

       In April, a group of U.N. human rights experts called the assault “systemic,” saying it “may be reasonable to ask” if Israel was committing “scholasticide” in Gaza.

       In a statement to The Washington Post, the Israeli military said “there is no IDF policy to target schools or educators. Rather, Hamas’ widespread and well documented strategy of exploiting schools and educational facilities for terror activities, has required IDF activity in those areas.”

       In March, Israeli military authorities said the leveling of Israa University two months earlier had occurred without “the required approvals,” and it reprimanded the commander responsible.

       As she scrambled to reach college, Balousha’s family nicknamed her “doctor,” for her ambition, her intelligence and her reliably high scores on yearly exams, she said. An aunt, named Islam, was her most enthusiastic supporter, sending her gifts of encouragement, including a box with books, chocolates and dried roses.

       “I went from the girl who was called ‘doctor’ to the one who became preoccupied with searching for a little water,” she said. Her aunt was killed with her husband and children in a strike on the Nuseirat refugee camp last year, she said.

       Balousha tried to keep up with her studies, downloading a remote-learning app she used during the coronavirus pandemic to prepare for matriculation exams: One day the war would surely end. But she had to walk nearly two miles to find an internet connection. She did not have a laptop. Phone batteries needed to be saved for emergencies. There was no light in her tent.

       “Everything is gone and will never return to the way it was,” she said.

       Educators have struggled to provide structure for students who are dispersed in tent communities, many living with horrific injuries or disease and consumed by privation and grief.

       Mleahat, of Anera, said the group is supporting children and youth groups in 50 shelters with “distraction activities,” including sports, painting, drawing and dancing. “It gives children a daily routine,” he said. “They are often sitting idly in shelters, not able to come to terms with the murder and mayhem around them.”

       The group pays special attention to teenagers. “They are at an age where they feel terrible anger. They become withdrawn,” he said. Fifteen-year-olds, in particular, are “most susceptible to self-harm and possibly suicide.” Groups of children are encouraged to talk, “to begin vocalizing their fears, begin developing some resilience with the trauma they have experienced,” Mleahat said.

       Children under 8 are also vulnerable. “If you are not providing them with learning possibilities, they tend not to be able to focus,” he said. “One of the most important skills children learn is the ability to concentrate, and that’s gone.”

       The United Nations’ UNRWA, which educated half of Gaza’s students before the war, has been hosting mental health and recreational programs in its schools turned shelters and accelerated the effort on Aug. 1, said Juliette Touma, its director of communications. But “there is no alternative to the actual school setup,” she said.

       The agency said it would expand its offerings to include a focus on “arts, music and sports — as well as raising awareness on the risks of explosive ordnance.”

       UNRWA staff are coping with their own trauma: 126 of its teachers have been killed during the war, the agency says. In total, 400 of the enclave’s 23,000 schoolteachers have been killed since October, according to the Palestinian Education Ministry, along with 100 university teaching staff.

       Sadiq al-Khadour, a ministry spokesman, said officials considered organizing mobile schools, but the idea was unworkable without a cease-fire. Instead, they are planning to expand learning in shelters and tents. Khadour spoke of providing internet points for students and distributing lessons electronically, though even that will be difficult with much of the enclave still struggling to access electricity.

       Gaza’s carnage is thwarting teachers who had been “zealous” about their work — carrying on a tradition that stretched from early Palestinian educational movements to recent times, as learning remained “at the core” of the Palestinian experience, Mleahat said.

       Education “provided a passport to the outside world” for Palestinian students and their teachers, who lent their skills to school systems around the Arab world, including in the Persian Gulf, he said.

       Asma Mustafa, an English teacher at a public school in northern Gaza before the war, has settled for a smaller world, mentoring displaced children in the places where she has sought safety for her own family.

       At a UNRWA school in November, the first of eight locations she has moved to over the course of the war, she used the library to read stories to groups of children every day at 3 p.m. Sometimes she would get them to dance — an “emotional discharge,” she said — or make them popcorn. The kids turned up in droves.

       The work has become harder as Gaza’s misery deepens. “There is no gas, no electricity, people cook on fires,” she said. The books she read from started disappearing, as people gathered anything that would burn.

       Still, she found ways to distract. In one class session, in Rafah, it was a popular Egyptian song that got everyone dancing. “I felt how much they needed this,” she said. By the time she moved to Khan Younis, she sensed that the children — who spent their days scavenging for wood or water — needed more: “how to think critically, how to solve their problems.” She began teaching basic first aid and personal hygiene as diseases spread through the camps.

       Mustafa talked about the days before the war, when she would “dress beautifully” for her students at school, her “second home.” Now she wondered what will remain of Gaza’s culture of education.

       Children are “exhausted,” she said, and “about to lose hope.” She fears many will decide not to go back to school, forced into adulthood too soon. “They are fathers, because of losing their fathers. They are mothers, because of losing their mothers.”

       “Our children,” she said, “are not children anymore.”