For Palestinian students in Gaza, the Tawjihi — the General Secondary Education Examination — has long represented one of life’s most consequential thresholds: a gateway to university, to profession, to future. In the summer of 2026, that milestone endures, but the conditions under which students are attempting to reach it have been stripped to almost nothing. No functioning classrooms. No reliable electricity. Inadequate food. For the third consecutive year, Gaza’s young people are sitting their high school finals inside a war, and the exam itself has become a measure not only of academic knowledge but of what human beings can endure.
A Tradition Reduced to Survival
The Tawjihi has been a fixture of Palestinian educational and social life for generations. Families traditionally gather around students in the weeks before exams; neighbourhoods quieten in solidarity; results day carries communal weight. That social architecture has been dismantled by more than two years of continuous conflict in Gaza. According to the Mondoweiss report, this is now the third year in which students are attempting the examination without the basic infrastructure that learning requires — no classrooms, no dependable power supply, and food that falls far short of adequate nutritional need.
The significance of that repetition cannot be understated. A generation of Gaza’s secondary school students has now spent the entirety of their final years of schooling under conditions of active military assault, mass displacement, and systemic deprivation.
The Conditions Students Face
The source describes an examination environment defined by compounding absences. Electricity, which was already severely restricted in Gaza before the current escalation of hostilities, remains unreliable — meaning students attempting to study after dark, or to access any electronic learning materials, face near-total darkness. Food insecurity, documented extensively by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA oPt) and other monitors throughout the conflict, continues to affect the cognitive capacity and physical stamina of young people trying to concentrate on exam preparation. And the most fundamental precondition for study — a home, a fixed place of relative safety and quiet — is absent for vast numbers of families who have been displaced, in many cases multiple times, since the onset of large-scale military operations.
To sit an exam under these conditions is not merely an academic act. It is an assertion of continuity against erasure.
Who Is Affected
Gaza’s pre-war population was approximately 2.3 million people, with a notably young demographic profile — roughly half the population was under 18. Secondary school students sitting the Tawjihi represent one of the most acutely affected cohorts: old enough to understand the full weight of what is being lost, young enough to have had their formative educational years consumed by conflict. OCHA and UNESCO have both documented the near-total collapse of Gaza’s formal education system since late 2023, with the overwhelming majority of school buildings damaged, destroyed, or repurposed as emergency shelters for the displaced.
The Wider Pattern: Education as a Casualty of War
International humanitarian law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, explicitly protects civilians — including children — and civilian infrastructure such as schools. Human rights organisations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Palestinian monitors Al-Haq and Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor have each documented the destruction of educational facilities in Gaza and the long-term consequences for the population’s right to education. The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education has raised Gaza specifically in the context of what scholars of international law describe as “scholasticide” — the systematic destruction of a people’s educational infrastructure.
For Palestinian families, education has historically represented one of the most durable forms of resistance to dispossession — a legacy stretching back to the Nakba of 1948, when Palestinian communities rebuilt around schools even in exile. The Tawjihi, in that context, carries meaning well beyond a certificate.
What to Watch
Whether Gaza’s education authorities — operating under conditions of extreme institutional strain — can administer, collect, and grade Tawjihi examinations in a way that is recognised and credible remains an open question. The longer-term consequences for a student cohort that has lost years of structured learning, experienced severe trauma, and faces ongoing physical deprivation will require sustained attention from humanitarian monitors and education bodies alike. OCHA oPt, UNICEF, and UNESCO are among the agencies whose reporting will reflect whether any recovery in Gaza’s education sector is possible while hostilities and the blockade continue.
What is already documented is this: Gaza’s students are taking their exams. That fact alone, in the circumstances the source describes, speaks to something that statistics struggle to contain.
Palestinian writer and researcher documenting life under occupation, drawing on primary sources from B’Tselem, Al-Haq, OCHA oPt, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and named scholars.