Tawjihi in Gaza requires two years of steady foundation and preparation: the 10th and 11th grade years that are supposed to lay the groundwork for the exams that determine whether a student can go on to university. Jana’s years were anything but steady.
Since the genocidal war began in October 2023, no school in Gaza has held a class. Classrooms became shelters for families who’d lost their homes, leaving students like my sister Jana, who was in the 10th grade when the genocide started, without a classroom for their learning.
Two months into the genocide, for a week, Israeli soldiers invaded our neighborhood, Al-Sahaba. We were trapped inside our own home with barely any food or water left, the sound of bombing and gunfire never stopping, day or night. It ended, eventually. But it wasn’t long before the next blow came.
In February 2024, my uncle Hani was killed by Israeli soldiers while trying to secure flour for his family from the aid trucks. My uncle was like a father to Jana. There was no room for her to grieve out loud, only quietly, on an empty stomach. So, school wasn’t on Jana’s mind. Survival meant one thing: staying alive by bearing hunger and exhaustion, while hundreds of people died every day around us.
When internet access returned eight months into the genocide, school resumed through online classes, an attempt to keep students from losing more years of their lives to the genocide.
“I guess you won’t be able to escape Tawjihi after all,” my father said to Jana jokingly.
“That would be the case if we survive the next two years up to Tawjihi. Still, you never know,” Jana replied wryly.
But a class online only works with a charged phone and an internet signal, and in our house, neither could be taken for granted. Every morning and again in the afternoon, I’d take her phone and a battery for the internet to the charging point, a shop that ran on solar power and charged anything for a few shekels. Even with the phone charged, studying was its own battle. Most days Jana was living on one meal, usually lentils, no bread. It was hard to hold any information in her head on an empty stomach. And there was the bombing, which never fully stopped, shaking the windows while she tried to hold a sentence together in her mind. She’d sit for the lessons anyway, day after day, worn down by a body that hadn’t eaten enough and a mind that had been startled too many times to focus on anything as small as physics or math.
Her notebooks filled up anyway, page after page, through two grades she’d later barely remember passing.
A ceasefire came a month after Jana’s Tawjihi year began. The Ministry of Education in Gaza discussed, for the first time since the genocide began, holding the Tawjihi exams on paper, in real classrooms. It felt normal, almost. But two years of instruction lost to genocide could not be regained in a month. Jana, like every other student, walked into the most important exam of her life without the foundation those years should have built.
To keep Jana from falling behind, my family found four private tutors for Arabic, math, English, and history. We paid a total of $250 a month for them. My father and I were both unemployed, working whatever jobs we could find, and most of what we earned went straight to those tutors.
Jana’s days settled into a rhythm built entirely around whatever hours the house had power. Her desk stayed half-buried under the same objects, day after day: a cup of coffee that went cold before she was halfway through it, and textbooks worn soft at the corners from being opened and closed hundreds of times. The wall above the desk filled slowly with sticky notes: yellow, pink, and purple squares holding vocabulary words, dates, and formulas—layered on top of each other until barely any wall was left to see.
She moved between subjects without much of a break. When she did take one, she’d come sit in the living room, and I’d tease her: “You do anything but study, as usual.” For a few minutes we’d talk about anything except Tawjihi, nothing important, just trying to hand her back some small sense of a life that existed outside of studying. Then she would return to whatever the tutors had assigned for the week because stopping meant losing whatever light or charge or signal she had.
In May 2026, a month before the exams, the Ministry of Education announced that Tawjihi would be held online because they weren’t able to provide enough spaces to hold it on paper. That created a new problem: where would Jana even take it? Any student who lost their internet connection or switched screens mid-exam would automatically fail that subject. Losing power for even a few seconds could undo a year of tutors, lentils, and charging points.
I suggested a café or a co-working space, somewhere with a more reliable connection, but Jana refused. She said she couldn’t focus with noise around her, and that she’d fail either way if that happened. My mother didn’t push the idea either; even during the ceasefire, the streets weren’t safe from Israeli strikes, so my mother didn’t want Jana out of the house. So home was the only option left. I borrowed a 200-volt battery from my cousin, something steadier than the generator, and we convinced ourselves it would be enough. It wasn’t a relief. It was just the best we could do.
The first exam was Islamic Education. Partway through, the internet cut out. After everything — the tutors, the year of studying with no breaks, the exhaustion — it happened anyway, on the very first exam. Jana broke down. But when the connection came back, she kept going, hoping it wouldn’t be enough to fail her. She got through the rest of the exams that way, carrying that fear with her into every one of them. It came back on the last day, during the math exam. The internet cut off again. She cried through that one too, and finished it anyway. When she was done, she cried a third time, but not with relief. She didn’t know yet if the first and the last exams had just been taken from her.
For a month, she waited anxiously. She was afraid, specifically, of losing the chance to go to college and become a psychological counselor. During the genocide, our cousin Nada was displaced with her two daughters, Marwa and Hana, in our building. Jana loves kids, so she would ask Nada if she could take care of her daughters for hours at a time.
Jana would teach them, do their makeup, pull out her old toys, and play with them like the genocide outside didn’t exist. Children found comfort with her, to the point that Marwa and Hana would run past their own mother to get to Jana first. Since Jana also watched what the genocide did to children in Gaza, she wanted to become a psychological counselor, so she could help them process what they’d survived.
My family didn’t prepare anything for results day: no decorations, no gathering, nothing like what we’d done for my brother and me. Jana asked us not to. She was afraid she would fail because of the two exams. When her result came through on Jana’s phone — 94% — she cried. My mother ran to her and held her, crying too. When I went to hug her, she pulled back just enough to look at me with tears still on her face and said: “I win. I got a higher grade in Tawjihi than you.” I laughed, and it felt like the whole month of waiting finally exhaled.
And then the house came alive all at once: my father, my brother, and I rushing to prepare everything we hadn’t let ourselves prepare like buying decorations, calling family to come, carrying trays of sweets out to give to the neighbors.
Jana is eighteen now. She got the grade she needed, and in a few months she’ll start studying psychology, her motivation steadfast in her heart: for the children of Gaza, and what they lived through.
Passing Tawjihi: Under the Weight of Continuous Genocide by Ahmad Sbaih
Images courtesy of Ahmad Sbaih
Saturday, September 19, 2026
