Dana Shabat Takes Tawjihi Online From Deir el-Balah Tent Amid Gaza School Destruction

In Gaza’s Deir el-Balah, 18-year-old Dana Shabat faces her high school graduation exams, the tawjihi, while living displaced in a tent and taking tests online because many Gaza schools have been destroyed or used as shelters.

“Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip – This week has been possibly the most important of 18-year-old Dana Shabat’s life: her high school graduation exams”

Al Jazeera

Dana says, “I never imagined that the most decisive stage of my life would look like this,” as she walks before dawn to reach a cafe with enough internet to sit for her physics exam at 9am.

Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera reports that Dana has already lived through more than two and a half years of Israel’s war on Gaza, surviving an Israeli strike in May last year that killed her mother, Lina, and leaving her with the task of studying remotely.

The article says Dana is one of 37,000 Palestinian students taking the tawjihi exams, with the first time since the war started that the exams have been held in coordination with Palestinian authorities in the West Bank.

In the West Bank, students take the exams in schools and examination halls, while in Gaza students take the tests online as Dana waits for the online examination portal to open.

Thousands of students in Gaza are preparing for the General Secondary Certificate exams scheduled for the start of next week, on June 20, with the exams held in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem on the same date for the first time in two years.

The exams for Gaza-born students born in 2007 and 2008 are taken electronically via the WISE SCHOOL app donated by the Jordanian Ministry of Education to its Palestinian counterpart, and the Gaza Ministry of Education says the app lets each student log in with a username and password that serves as a seat number.

Al-Jazeera Net

Ahmed al-Najjar, Director General of Public Relations and Media at the Gaza Ministry of Education, said that about 37,500 students will sit the exams this year inside the Gaza Strip, while the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Education adopted an exceptional timetable with exams starting on June 20 and ending on June 29 in Gaza.

The same report says about 2,200 Gaza students who left for treatment during the war will take the exams electronically at the premises of Palestinian embassies and consulates in 46 countries, including Egypt, Jordan, Gulf states, Turkey, and several Southern European countries.

It also states that the ongoing war has deprived about 609,000 students of regular schooling and disrupted more than 26,000 educational and administrative staff, including 22,000 teachers, while more than 293 out of 309 schools were damaged or turned into shelters.

As Gaza students take the Tawjihi through screens and tents, Al Jazeera Net describes Iman Awwad leaving her displacement tent each morning with her father to find electricity and Internet, because the tents lack the prerequisites for study.

“Exams Among the Rubble”

Anadolu Ajansi

Iman says the “Wise School platform link did not work during one of the tests,” and she faced difficulty uploading her physics answers before she managed at the last moments to send them to the ministry after repeated attempts.

Her father confirms that the link failure and repeated attempts nearly caused the exam to be lost, and the article says some students had to wait for the second round of exams.

Anadolu Ajansı reports that in the Bureij camp in central Gaza, students take Tawjihi exams online inside an educational space provided by the Turkish charity Bab al-Ajar Foundation, where electricity and internet are provided to support the tests.

The stakes are described as immediate and personal: Iman’s daily journey is framed as a battle that begins with finding electricity, then an empty seat, and finally an online link that works until the end of the exam.