The girls in the Gaza school photograph

Nuseirat, Gaza Strip — Maha Taha fills the old blackboard with equations and sets her students to work. For the next few minutes, the classroom settles into the scratch of pens and the low murmur of girls working through the problems. Maha, 43, has taught mathematics for 20 years. Dressed in an olive-green jalabeya and beige hijab, she steps quietly to her desk at the side of the room, as her students work through the maths problems. She has watched generations of girls pass through her classroom, preparing for exams and applying to universities. Asked about the girls she taught before the October 7 genocide began, Maha pauses before reaching for her phone. While scrolling back to find a photograph taken in June 2023, she speaks softly, so as not to disturb the girls in the classroom. Maha Taha, 43, has taught mathematics at Muscat Secondary School for Girls for 20 years. In June 2023, she posed for a selfie with 15 of her pupils. Three years later, she still keeps the photograph on her phone [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera] “I was proud of them," she says. "I could see that they had bright futures ahead of them. They were very special in their personalities, even before it came to their studies. But October 7 changed the course of their lives.” In the photo, 15 teenage girls in navy school robes and white scarves crowd around Maha in the schoolyard. Some have their arms around one another; others lean towards the camera. All are smiling. They had just finished their mock exams and wanted a photograph together. Sara Rayan took it, holding out the phone so everyone fit in the frame. The girls were 17 and 18. Like many teenagers their age, they worried about exams and university places, talked about what they wanted to become, and imagined the lives that lay ahead. Four months later, Israel's war on Gaza began. Three years on, one of the girls in the photograph has been killed in an Israeli air strike. Four have left Gaza. Others have been displaced - their education interrupted and their plans for the future upended. Al Jazeera set out to find the 15 girls, to discover what had happened to them and the futures they once imagined, and to see whether they could be brought together again for a photograph in the same schoolyard. Muscat Secondary School is still standing, although it was struck by artillery in February 2024 and became a shelter for displaced families. Some classrooms still bear the marks of the war: holes left by quadcopter gunfire, windows damaged by shelling and soot stains where families cooked over open fires. On the walls, children have drawn kites, flowers and a Palestinian flag. Some have written their names: Haya, Marah, Mohammed and Khaled. Displaced families still shelter in parts of the school, while a tent at the edge of the yard serves as a makeshift classroom for younger pupils whose own school can no longer accommodate them. It's just past 10am on a Thursday in late September when Yasmin Abu Zaid arrives. Then Aya Adnan arrives, quickening her pace when she sees Yasmin and pulling her into an embrace. “I haven’t seen you for three years,” she says. “Where have you been? You never show up.” Lina Yunis Abd al-Qader arrives a few minutes later, carrying a plastic bag of books for Aya’s younger sister, who is preparing for the Tawjihi, Gaza’s national secondary school graduation exams. Aya and Lina have seen each other since leaving school. Their families have been friends for years, and they still live in the same neighbourhood of Nuseirat. But Yasmin, who once lived nearby, was displaced early in the war. With the fighting making it difficult to meet, neither has seen her for three years. The three have also kept in touch with Ghaida Zaqout, who now lives in Egypt. Together, they have a private WhatsApp group where they chat regularly and check on one another. When Maha finishes teaching, she greets "my girls" with arms wide open. They erupt into chatter, talking over one another and trying to catch up. In time, Maha pulls up the old photograph on her phone. The girls huddle around her, then point at the tree behind them, recognising it from the photograph. Now, they begin recalling the school days they shared. There were the ordinary intimacies of teenage friendship: who would lend you a pen, who would explain homework you didn't understand, who whispered through lessons and who worried for days about an exam. "These are my girls," she says again. Ghaida was the girl whose laughter could be heard before she entered the classroom, and who rarely stopped talking, even when teachers moved her to another desk. Sara and her twin sister Fatima were forever taking selfies, while Lina al-Hour was quieter, often bringing novels to read during breaks. The girls talked about clothes, television programmes and football. They bought food together during breaks and wondered aloud about university and what they might become. Some dreamed of studying medicine; another wanted to design buildings. Their futures still seemed to turn on exams, marks, university places and what their families could afford. Maha remembers Sara Rayan laughing, and Ghaida, she says, is in Egypt now, studying dentistry. Then, she reaches Lina al-Hour. Here, she pauses, enlarges Lina’s face on the screen and falls silent. Her smile has disappeared. When she speaks again, her voice is quieter and catches slightly. “This is my well-mannered student, Lina,” she says softly. “She is a martyr.” On November 17, 2023, Lina was killed in an Israeli air strike. She was 18. For a moment, the girls wrap their arms even tighter around one another in silence. The photograph stays open on her phone. Standing in the same schoolyard three years later, they tell one another they wish they could return to those days. But most of the girls in the photograph are missing at this reunion. Aya takes out her phone and holds it at arm's length, trying to recreate the selfie Sara took three years earlier. “Sara should have been here to take it,” she says. But Sara cannot come. She now works for an NGO, using her wages to help pay her university fees and contribute to her family's income. Aya Adnan stands with the three in the new photograph, tall, with a dimple in her chin and her hijab falling behind her shoulders. Three years earlier, she had been looking forward to university. She wanted to become a doctor, preferably a neurosurgeon. Aya enjoyed studying. She arrived early for extra physics lessons and worked through difficult material until she understood it. She had also noticed how few female surgeons there were in Gaza and disliked hearing that surgery was too demanding a profession for women. Her interest in neurology had become personal in the 11th grade, when she suffered a severe headache and dizziness that lasted 24 hours. “It felt like my head was heavier than my body,” she recalls, “as if it might fall off.” After undergoing scans and seeing a neurologist, she was told pressure from the vertebrae in her neck was affecting her spinal cord. The experience only made her more determined to study neurology. When her final school results came, she had scored 96 percent. But studying medicine was expensive, and the family - her father was an UNRWA social worker - could not comfortably afford the fees. Aya turned to her older brother Yasser. Seventeen years her senior, Yasser was a lawyer with his own practice, a wife and three children: Adnan, nine, Ahmad, seven, and three-year-old Ilaf. He helped support their parents and hoped one day to teach law at university. “I used to always tell him, ‘You're a second father to me,’ because he was so kind to me, just like my father,” Aya says. Aya remembers a summer's day in August 2023. Yasser, still dressed in his smart work clothes, came to take her from Nuseirat to the Islamic University of Gaza. "Together, we went from department to department, trying to find a course that was affordable and that I would enjoy," she says. Professors suggested engineering. But when they came out, Aya told Yasser she couldn't imagine herself studying computers or becoming an engineer. “I could picture myself wearing a white coat, that's all,” she told him. They tried health sciences next. “Maybe I could study something in the medical field,” Aya suggested. “I really liked medical laboratory sciences.” Yasser knew that his sister was giving up the version of university she had imagined. But he refused to let her see the decision as the end of something. "Perhaps it's for the best," he told her. "Maybe one day you'll become a doctor in the field you choose to specialise in. You don't have to be a medical doctor; you could become a university professor with a PhD." Then, he offered her a thought that has stayed with her. "He told me, 'Sometimes what is withheld from us can be better for us than what is given to us,' and I believe him." Afterwards, he took her to Al-Taboun restaurant for lunch, while they kept talking about university and the choices available. Aya enrolled in medical laboratory sciences, and Yasser bought her books and supplies. University had barely completed its first week when the war began. A strike on a neighbouring two-storey house badly damaged the family home in Nuseirat, where they had lived for more than 35 years. They moved into an aunt's house. The new university timetable that had occupied Aya only weeks earlier disappeared. Instead of laboratories and lectures, her days revolved around finding water, helping prepare food, and learning how to cook without the things the family had once taken for granted. She didn't know how to build a fire; she hadn't needed to. Yasser would continue to return to the family's damaged home, partly to check on what they had left behind and partly because he feared their possessions would be stolen. Sometimes, he stayed there. On one of those visits, he asked Aya to come with him. There were dishes to wash, floors to sweep, rooms to tidy. She said she couldn't. She was helping their mother prepare food. On December 12, as the family gathered for afternoon prayers at her aunt's house, they heard a missile strike. Several minutes later, one of Aya's friends called. She wanted to know where the family was. Then she asked about Yasser, who had returned to their damaged home alone. The strike had hit the house, killing him. He was 32. Aya would return again and again to Yasser asking her to come with him, and her reply that she couldn't. It was an ordinary exchange between siblings, insignificant enough that Aya might never have remembered it, except it was also their last conversation. When she returned to the house about a week later, she found what remained of the plastic shopping bags that held the university supplies Yasser had bought for her only months earlier. Shaking off dust and ash, she opened them one by one. “I was surprised I found them at all; they reminded me of Yasser,” she says. Some books had survived, but others were almost entirely burned; only three pages remained from one set of lecture notes. Ballpoint pens, markers, and coloured pencils lay among the notes. Aya gathered, and still has, what remained. After 18 months, when universities started offering remote learning, Aya logged on whenever electricity and an internet connection allowed. Medical laboratory sciences was supposed to be hands-on: equipment, experiments, laboratories. Aya was trying to learn it without any of those things. "My major is very practical, and most of its courses are practical," she says. "It was difficult for me to study them online when I wasn't even at the university, and there were no laboratories or equipment in front of me."