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.Dana is an exceptional student – her average grade has never fallen below 99 percent – but she’s still nervous.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listThe exams, in Dana’s eyes, will be decisive in mapping out her future. She’s not sure about what to study at university – torn between medicine, finance, and business administration – but she’s hoping to do well enough to secure a scholarship abroad and build a future far from the hardship she has endured in Gaza.Dana has already lived through more than two and a half years of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. She survived an Israeli strike in May last year, but her mother, Lina, was killed in the attack – one of more than 73,000 Palestinians to have been killed since October 2023.She grew up in Beit Hanoon, in northern Gaza, but that area has largely been razed by Israeli forces, and she now lives displaced with her surviving family in a tent in central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah. Dana Shabat has to find any place she can to study for her exams [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]With many of Gaza’s schools destroyed by Israeli attacks, or used as shelters by the displaced, Dana has been forced to continue her education remotely. The exams – known as the tawjihi – are no different.This week may be crucial, but Dana is going to spend it waking up each day before dawn, walking for an hour, and finding a spot in one of the few cafes she can trust to have a good enough internet connection for her to take the exams on …
