When Sally Abu Mkhaimer learned in ِAugust 2021 that she had received high marks on the Tawjihi, the Palestinian high school graduation exam, her family behaved as though it was the most important day of her life. They hired a raucous, dozen-member folk band to parade through the streets of Rafah and threw a huge party. Tables sagged under the weight of trays of sweets and gifts for Sally, as the house filled with laughter.
The scale of the Mkhaimers’ celebration was in no way unusual. In Gaza, the Tawjihi is far more than a standardized test. In refugee camps, in villages under occupation, on the Strip’s crowded streets, succeeding in the exam has long symbolized endurance – even victory – over a life of narrowly scripted choices. To pass the Tawjihi is to step into adulthood carrying both your own dreams and your country’s.
But as Sally’s younger sister Sarah sat her Tawjihi exams this month, that symbolism felt distant. With 97% of Gaza’s schools damaged or destroyed, Sarah took the test on the dirt floor of a tent, using a glitchy cellphone app and a flimsy internet connection. If she passed, there would be no party.
Why We Wrote This
Gaza’s high school graduation exams are seen as far more than an individual academic accomplishment. They are a step into adulthood, carrying both your dreams and your country’s. The war has made that transition nearly impossible.
“I only want her to be safe, and to get whatever result she gets,” says Sarah and Sally’s mother, Iman. “There is no more passion or enthusiasm. The war killed all of this.”
Stuck in place
Sarah Abu Mkhaimer is one of 35,000 students in Gaza who were scheduled – along with their fellow students in the West Bank – to take the standardized Tawjihi in June 2024. Universities require high scores for entry, and even less-prestigious jobs in fields ranging from security to cleaning to transport also require passing marks.
A lover of Dostoyevsky’s novels and Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” Ms. Mkhaimer dreamed of traveling the world and studying English literature. Then came the war, as Israel retaliated for Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
Families fled home. Just weeks after the beginning of the school year, her school closed. The Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education announced that the Tawjihi would be postponed in Gaza. Amid falling bombs and repeated displacement orders, it scrambled to find a workable plan to reschedule the exams. Meanwhile, for students, the months dragged by in uncertainty.
“Without a phone, without a laptop, without a room, I don’t feel like I can really learn anything new,” Ms. Mkhaimer explains.
But the long wait did more than hold back students’ academic progress. It left them stranded on the precipice between childhood and their adult lives.
When students in the West Bank received their Tawjihi results in July this year, “I felt something hit me in the chest,” says Mohammad Ishtiwi, another student scheduled to take the exam in 2024. “They are going to college. We are still stuck in the same spot.”
Before the Israeli invasion, Mr. Ishtiwi was determined to become a history teacher, a dream his entire family threw themselves behind. They cleared the living room of their house in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood so he could study, whispering as they tiptoed through. “My only job was to focus. My only responsibility was to study,” he recalls.
But in October 2023, his family was forced to evacuate that home. “My schoolbag, my notebooks, my books, we left them all behind,” he says.
Now, Mr. Ishtiwi’s library-quiet living room has been replaced by the floor of the cramped tent he shares with his family in Deir al-Balah, where “it feels like studying in a hospital. Everything around me is about survival: water, food, aid.”
“Geography is war”
And the educational system that once prepared students in Gaza for the Tawjihi is in ruins. Schools are closed for the third consecutive year, and nearly every school building in the enclave has been damaged or destroyed.
Meanwhile, students have lost the teachers and classmates they once imagined celebrating their Tawjihi results with. Mr. Ishtiwi’s two closest friends were killed in Israeli airstrikes.
“We studied together. We rode bicycles to school together. We went to the sea and swam. We had late dinners together. We shared everything,” he says. “Now, when I try to feel happy, I just remember who I’ve lost.”
This summer, the Education Ministry and the United Nations Development Programme decided they would attempt to administer the Tawjihi – which consists of multiple-choice exams in several subjects – online via a smartphone app. Students due to take the exams in 2024 and 2025, such as Ms. Mkaimer and Mr. Ishtiwi, totaled around 79,000.
It was no simple task in an active war zone that is also frequently subject to Israeli internet blackouts. Ms. Mkhaimer, for instance, planned to take the exams on her sister Sally’s cellphone, and her brain whirred with nervous thoughts: What if there was nowhere to charge it before the exam? What if the battery died before she finished?
Meanwhile, Mr. Ishtiwi missed his first exam, in Arabic, because of a wobbly internet connection on the cellphone he had borrowed from his mother.
But he was able to retake that exam, and, by the middle of September, both he and Ms. Mkhaimer had at last completed the Tawjihi.
Their results should come in one to two months. But it won’t be the same. Their families no longer have houses where they can fly banners from the windows announcing their children’s Tawjihi success. The names of passing students won’t be listed in the local newspaper, which is no longer printed, nor shared on social media, where feeds are filled with stories of grief and loss. And the thought of a party with cakes and candies feels like a luxury from another life.
“Before, geography meant drawing maps and coloring them,” Ms. Mkhaimer says. “Now, geography is war. We study history, but our own lives are full of it already.”
