Ahmed Kamal Junina: “Every class we hold is a defiant refusal to surrender”

Since October 2023, Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza has produced one of the most comprehensive destructions of an education system in modern history. All 12 universities in the territory have been levelled; over ninety-seven percent of schools have been damaged or destroyed; tens of thousands of children have been killed, and hundreds of educators and administrators are dead or missing. Amid this devastation and loss of life, there has been a deliberate attempt at hollowing out Gaza’s intellectual life, its archives, its future. Yet, amid this erasure, educators such as Ahmed Kamal Junina, an assistant professor of applied linguistics and translation, and head of the English department at Al-Aqsa University, continue to teach with whatever resources they have, mostly through online classes. The Caravan’s senior fact-checker, Swetha Kadiyala, spoke to Junina about life in Gaza and what it means to teach under these conditions.

What made you decide, at severe personal risk amid an unimaginable crisis, to continue teaching?

Continuing to teach didn’t feel like a heroic choice—it was more of a lifeline. I lost 43 members of my extended family in this war, including my sister, three nephews, my niece Amal, whose name means “hope,” two brothers-in-law, my uncle and two cousins, along with their families. After holding funerals for them whenever we could, I returned to teaching my students virtually. When your world is collapsing, you hold on to whatever gives you a sense of meaning, and, for me, that was teaching. It kept me connected to my students, many of whom had lost homes, family members or entire neighbourhoods. When a student tells you, “That one hour of class was the only time I didn’t think about the war,” you find a way to keep going.

Many colleagues made the same choice to keep teaching. We taught from tents, from overcrowded shelters, from corners of displacement camps where the internet barely held. Drones constantly circled overhead, forming the backdrop to the voice notes my students sent in our WhatsApp course group. Ambulance sirens were never far away. Students often cried during class, and, some days, our conversations focussed more on survival than on assignments. But those makeshift classes became spaces of collective resilience, a quiet refusal to surrender our humanity or our commitment to education. This spirit also inspired my initiative RECONNECT, which aims to help students re-engage with learning, find study opportunities and reconnect with the world despite the ongoing war.