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.
“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."
She kept going, and so did another girl in the photograph who once imagined herself in a white coat.
Lina Yunis Abd al-Qader, known as “the tall one”, had also imagined becoming a surgeon.
At school, she had loved Turkish dramas and anime and had a habit of doodling on her desk, much to the annoyance of her biology teacher. Those interests have since fallen away.
She graduated with 98.3 percent and enrolled in medicine at the Islamic University of Gaza on September 10, 2023.
Less than a month later, the war brought her studies to a halt.
Her father, Yunis Abd al-Qader, works as a paramedic with the Palestinian Red Crescent. During the war, he worked 24-hour shifts and returned home only for brief rest.
Lina worried each time he left.
“I would wonder if he would come back the next day," she says. "I wished I could be there with him, to help him through the difficult things he was seeing.”
Usually quiet and reserved, her father tried to spare the family the details of what he encountered. But sometimes, he came home exhausted, and the strain showed.
One account he shared stayed with Lina. After an Israeli strike, he had been recovering human remains. Initially, he believed they belonged to seven people. As he continued working, he realised there was an eighth.
Having witnessed the scale of amputations, fractures and other injuries, she wants to specialise in orthopaedic surgery.
As she continued her medical studies, Lina became close to another student, Shams Majdi.
Their friendship was still new when Lina struggled with a physiology problem and messaged Shams on WhatsApp for help.
Shams lived in northern Gaza, where internet access was unreliable. With Israeli quadcopters overhead, she travelled several kilometres to find a connection so she could help solve the problem with Lina over the phone.
Lina remembers the trouble her new friend took to help her.
Later, the two sat the same exam remotely, from different parts of Gaza.
Shams had again travelled away from home to find an internet connection.
After finishing the exam, Lina opened WhatsApp.
“Shams, did you get home?”
Lina says Shams was usually quick to respond, when she could. So she waited.
About 45 minutes later, a message appeared in their medical college group announcing that Shams Majdi had been killed.
Lina stared at the name.
For about 10 minutes, she says that she struggled to comprehend that it was the same Shams whose reply she had been waiting for.
She opened their conversation again.
“Shams, where are you?”
“Tell me this is a lie.”
She kept sending messages throughout the day. None was answered.
Shams had been killed in an Israeli strike on her home, alongside members of her family.
For the following week, Lina says, she cried whenever she opened her medical books.
There had been another Lina in Maha's classroom.
Lina al-Hour, the quieter girl who loved novels and wrote letters to her friends, had also enrolled in medicine. She had attended her first week of university before the war began.
On November 17, 2023, an Israeli air strike hit her family's home. Lina was killed alongside her parents, siblings and other relatives.
With no surviving parent or sibling for Al Jazeera to interview, her former classmates and teacher helped piece together memories of her life.
Maha remembers the way she listened in class. The girls remember how easily they could make her laugh.
Lina Abd al-Qader remembers the strangeness of sharing a name with a friend who is now gone.
“I and my friend who was killed had the same name,” she says. “But my friend was killed, and I still cannot get over it.”
Ghaida Zaqout is now in Egypt, more than 300km (186 miles) from the schoolyard where she once posed with her classmates. Speaking to Al Jazeera by phone, she recalls how she used to fill her schoolbooks with drawings of the wooden houses she admired in Japanese anime, and dreamed of becoming an architect.
On October 20, 2023, Ghaida turned 18.
By then, her sister Asmaa, her husband and their two children had moved in after losing their home in an Israeli air strike. Her maternal uncle's family was staying with them, too. About 15 people were living under one roof.
Ghaida decided to make herself a small birthday cake.
She found eggs, flour and baking powder and began arranging the ingredients in the kitchen, joking with her sister's children as she worked.
Then, her aunt called with news that her cousin Majdi, 33, had been killed.
He had always made Ghaida laugh. At family birthdays, he liked to scoop cream from the cake and smear it across her face. A natural storyteller, he could turn even the simplest anecdote into something funny.
They had last seen each other on October 5, when the family went to Roots Cafe on Gaza's seafront.
Ghaida left the ingredients on the kitchen counter and went to check on her mother. She doesn't remember who eventually cleared away the eggs and flour.
Her mother had previously undergone surgery for breast cancer and was receiving follow-up treatment at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, including medication and radiotherapy. As her mother's treatment became harder to continue inside Gaza, because of the genocide, the family decided Ghaida would accompany her out.
Leaving presented a problem she had never imagined having to solve. "I thought, how can I fit 17 years of my life into one bag?" she says.
Ghaida began with paper. She gathered every certificate she could find, going all the way back to kindergarten: school results, awards, certificates from courses she had taken. She packed photographs of friends and family and the little gifts her friends had given her, keeping the messages and notes that came with them.
There were practical things too, like her charger, Lyon potato chips and Al Awda’s crackers, and her pair of white wool pyjamas, speckled with red cherries, that she particularly loved.
Then, there was the family archive.
They had an old camera that had been used to document their lives since before Ghaida was born, along with CDs and a box of photographs accumulated over generations. There were pictures of her grandparents, her mother as a student, her parents before they married, their wedding and the announcement of their marriage.
Ghaida wanted to take the box, but there wasn’t enough room for it.
What she remembers most clearly about packing was deciding what she could bear to leave.
"I wished I could carry the whole house with me," she says, "not the material things, but the things that had meaning for us. You know what I mean? The things that touched our hearts."
The photographs were among the things that stayed behind. Later, certain they would not be able to return, the family asked a relative to go back to the house. There were too many photographs for him to carry away, and they did not want their family pictures falling into other hands.
They asked the relative to burn them.
She crossed through Rafah with her mother and 16-year-old brother Abdul Rahman and eventually settled in Madinaty, in the east of Cairo.
That first day, they ate fried chicken. For the first time in months, the things that had become difficult in Gaza were suddenly easy. Food was available. There was electricity. She could sleep without hearing shelling or drones overhead.
Her friends were still in Gaza. Ghaida would call and hear about the difficulty of finding food and water. Then, she would look at what was available around her in Egypt.
She lost her appetite and her weight plummeted by more than 10kg (22 pounds).
"My soul is in Gaza," she says.
It was not until September 2025 that Ghaida finally began university. She was 19, a month short of 20, sitting among students two years younger.
And she was no longer studying architecture. She chose dentistry to help people in Gaza when she returns.
"If the crossings open permanently," she says, "I will return immediately."
Yasmin Abu Zaid had grown up as "the pampered one", in the words of her older sisters, and something she admits to herself.
She is the youngest of three sisters and remained the family's youngest child for 10 years, until her brother was born. She had few household responsibilities. If she asked for something, her family usually found a way to get it for her.
Her grandfather was particularly indulgent. Whenever he went to the market, he would return with something for Yasmin, food, sweets, whatever had caught his eye and made him think of her.
Within days of the war beginning, Yasmin's life changed.
Her family lived on the third floor of the Ain Jalut towers in Nuseirat, in an apartment along Salah al-Din Street. When a nearby mosque was bombed that October, their home was badly damaged. The family temporarily moved into her grandmother's nearby flat. But by December, Yasmin was fleeing shelling again with her sisters and other relatives. Eventually, they drove south to Rafah, where they found temporary shelter.
Their old apartment was bombed again on January 4, 2024. On a different floor of the same building, her father's goldsmithing workshop, where he worked with gold brought into Gaza from the occupied West Bank, Egypt and Dubai, was destroyed. He has not worked as a goldsmith since.
Then, on June 8, 2024, the apartment they had been displaced to was hit by Israeli fire.
Yasmin was near a window with her sisters and other relatives when a shell struck.
She remembers the explosion, although it was not as loud as she would have expected. Then, the room filled with white dust.
Yasmin could move her arms. She knew she was bleeding, but could not tell where she had been injured. Shrapnel had entered her chest, and she struggled to breathe. Through it all, she could hear the screams for help from her sisters, until one of them passed out.
“I kept closing my eyes because I was so exhausted, and I couldn’t breathe properly,” Yasmin says. “Every time I closed my eyes, I remembered my life before the war. I felt like what was happening was just a nightmare that I wanted to wake up from.”
As her breathing became more difficult, she says, “I genuinely felt like I was going to die.”
Her father managed to find and rescue her and her sisters, but Yasmin says many weren't as lucky. "During the war, I lost about 30 members of my extended family, killed by Israeli forces."
Her education stopped for roughly a year and a half.
When she returned, she chose psychology, the subject that had interested her when she was still the pampered schoolgirl worrying about exams. But now she encountered the material differently.
As Yasmin learned about trauma and children's behaviour, she began recognising some of what she was studying at home.
Her sister would wake crying after hearing explosions. Her younger brother would wake frightened and run. Yasmin had her own response to bombardment.
"I used to look at the wall and feel that it was going to explode in my face," she says.
Her studies have changed the work she imagined doing, too. The girl who had once thought about helping children with disabilities is now particularly interested in children living with trauma.
The subject has also given her a way of thinking about what happened to her own family.
"It had a big impact on helping me accept the bombing of our home, my father's workshop, and everything we have lost," she says.
Back in her classroom, Maha continues teaching mathematics, just as she did before the war. But much has changed.
With classrooms damaged and teachers killed or displaced, the school is struggling to accommodate its pupils. Maha now teaches classes of up to 45 girls, far more than before the war.
Many of her students have been displaced, some repeatedly. Others have lost relatives and classmates. Maha herself is less strict now, she says. "Attendance and rules once mattered. If a student failed to turn up or didn't keep up with homework, I wanted to know why."
Now, she may already know. A girl might have been displaced. Her parents may be afraid to let her travel to school because of shelling. She may have had little to eat.
During periods of severe hunger, Maha watched students trying to follow lessons after barely eating the day before.
"I can see it on their faces," she says. "The girls aren't smiling. Their expressions have changed. They look sad and exhausted."
One of the strongest students in another class began sitting at the back. Maha noticed that 10 or 15 minutes before the end of lessons, the girl would fall asleep. She asked her what was happening.
Both of the girl's parents had been killed. She was caring for her younger sisters while trying to continue her own education.
Although the war had kept formal education largely suspended, some teachers, like Maha, were trying to keep pupils learning where they could, squeezing in classes and exams.
Maha remembers a particular student who would always get top marks. In February 2025, the girl came to her, disappointed with her score of 14 out of 20 on a mathematics exam.
"I told her not to worry. I'd overlook this result and that she should focus on the next exam, and I'm sure she will do better. I said I'd use that mark instead," says Maha. And the girl left happy.
A few hours later, the girl's home was bombed. She was killed. Maha would place two photographs of the girl in the classroom. One on the back wall. Another hung beside the blackboard: a selfie of her smiling, both hands raised in V signs.
"Every time I looked at the photograph, it shook me," Maha says. "I would always remember that moment before she was killed, when she was sitting there worried about her grade."
One thought kept returning. "Thank God, I didn't disappoint her. I kept my promise to her and let her leave that day happy."
Now, the students at their desks finish the problems Maha has set for them.
In the corner by the window, a girl looks up from her desk.
“Miss, I’ve finished. Can you come and check my answers?”
Maha looks once more at the photograph from June 2023, before putting her phone away.
