Amid Gaza's Ruined Schools, One Woman Rebuilds Education From the Rubble of War

In a territory where classrooms have been reduced to dust and university lecture halls stand as hollowed shells, one woman has turned the debris of war into a modest but defiant act of preservation. Niveen Al-Gharabli, a resident of Gaza, has built a makeshift book stall from volumes salvaged from collapsed buildings and damaged homes, according to a report by Al Jazeera's NewsFeed. Her effort, small in scale but heavy with symbolism, offers a rare counterpoint to the widespread destruction of Gaza's educational infrastructure.

The scale of that destruction is difficult to overstate. Schools and universities across the enclave have been destroyed or severely damaged, leaving hundreds of thousands of students without access to formal learning. For a population that has long placed exceptional value on education—Gaza historically boasted one of the highest literacy rates in the Middle East and a dense network of schools run by both the United Nations and local authorities—the loss represents not merely physical damage but the erosion of a defining community asset.

Al-Gharabli's response has been practical rather than political. She gathers books from the rubble of ruined structures and from homes that have been abandoned or damaged. Each volume is then restored: pages cleaned, bindings repaired where possible, and the books prepared for a second life. The work is painstaking and often performed under conditions of scarcity, with limited access to clean water, electricity, and basic restoration materials.

Once restored, the books are made available through a makeshift stall. According to the report, Al-Gharabli sells them at low prices—or simply gives them away to students and others who cannot afford to pay. This dual approach reflects the economic reality facing most families in Gaza, where unemployment and poverty have reached extraordinary levels and where disposable income for anything beyond survival needs is virtually nonexistent.

The beneficiaries of her effort are primarily students whose educations have been interrupted or terminated by the conflict. With schools closed, damaged, or repurposed as shelters, many young people have been left to study on their own or to abandon their ambitions altogether. Access to textbooks and reading materials has become one of the quiet but critical bottlenecks in any attempt to sustain learning outside formal institutions.

Al-Gharabli's stall also serves a broader function. By rescuing books from the rubble, she is effectively curating a fragmented archive of Gaza's intellectual life. The volumes she recovers may include textbooks, literature, religious texts, or reference works—each one a fragment of the educational ecosystem that existed before the war. In this sense, her project is as much about cultural memory as it is about immediate access to reading material.

The initiative carries particular weight for Gaza's university students. Higher education in the enclave has been devastated, with campuses damaged and academic staff displaced. For students who were mid-degree when the destruction occurred, the loss of libraries and personal book collections has been a severe blow. Al-Gharabli's restored volumes offer at least a partial remedy, allowing some students to continue independent study in fields where they might otherwise have no resources at all.

The social meaning of the stall extends beyond the books themselves. In a context where normal community institutions have collapsed, such grassroots efforts provide a degree of continuity and normalcy. A book stall, even a makeshift one, is a place where people gather, exchange information, and reaffirm that education remains a value worth preserving. It functions as a small public square in a landscape otherwise defined by displacement and loss.

Experts on education in conflict zones frequently note that the destruction of schools and libraries is not incidental to war but often central to it. Educational infrastructure represents a society's future, and its demolition is a way of foreclosing that future. Rebuilding it—even through individual acts like Al-Gharabli's—is therefore a form of resistance to that foreclosure, though she herself is not described in the report as framing her work in such terms.

The practical challenges she faces are considerable. Salvaging books requires navigating unsafe ruins, and restoration demands materials that are scarce. Storage and display space for the volumes is limited, and the security situation remains volatile. There is also the constant risk that any location, however modest, could be damaged or abandoned as fighting shifts. Yet the report indicates that she persists, adapting her operation to the constraints of the moment.

International humanitarian law treats schools and cultural property as protected objects, and their destruction has been documented by numerous human rights organizations. But legal protections offer little comfort to students who need a textbook today. In the gap between legal norms and lived reality, initiatives like Al-Gharabli's fill a space that formal institutions and international agencies have been unable to occupy at the necessary speed and scale.

Her work also highlights the role of women in sustaining communities during conflict. Across Gaza, women have taken on expanded responsibilities as educators, caregivers, and organizers, often with minimal resources. Al-Gharabli's book stall exemplifies this pattern: a small, locally rooted enterprise that addresses an urgent need while embodying a longer-term commitment to the community's survival and renewal.

The story arrives amid broader coverage of the war's regional dimensions, including the Yemen conflict and diplomatic tensions involving Iran, the United States, and Israel. In the shadow of these larger geopolitical narratives, the fate of Gaza's students and the destruction of its schools risk being treated as background noise. Al-Gharabli's stall insists, quietly, that they remain central to any account of what the war has cost.

For the students who visit her stall, the exchange is straightforward: they leave with a book. For the wider society, the implications are harder to quantify. A single restored textbook cannot replace a university, and a makeshift stall cannot substitute for a functioning school system. But the act of returning books to circulation keeps alive the idea that education in Gaza is not finished—merely interrupted—and that at least one person is determined to see it continue.