This article has been updated to include news developments.

Before war broke out in Gaza, I spent five years teaching English to middle schoolers there. Now I cannot imagine myself returning to teach at schools where students have spent the past year sitting and sleeping on classroom floors with their families, seeking refuge from a relentless assault.

These children were not learning math or language. They were learning the names of Gazan neighborhoods as each was bombed. They were not practicing sports. They were practicing survival, carrying buckets of water for hundreds of feet and running from one classroom to another, from one school to another, from one tent to another, from one city to another, hoping not to be run over by a tank or crushed under bombed-out walls and ceilings.

Across Gaza, hundreds of schools have been turned into shelters, and many of them have been attacked by Israeli forces, who say Hamas fighters use them as command centers. These attacks have killed hundreds of people, according to local health authorities. One Israeli airstrike hit a school in the Nuseirat refugee camp, home to about 12,000 displaced people, for the fifth time in September, killing 18 people.

On Saturday morning, I learned from my school’s WhatsApp group that my most talented student, Hatem al-Zaaneen, had been killed in Beit Hanoun, where Israel that day carried out strikes.

How can a teacher — me or anyone else — return to teach children and pretend these same places have not been zones of death and suffering? During previous military conflicts in Gaza, it was mainly students who received psychological support. The question of offering support for teachers was rarely raised. But after nearly a year of war, how can traumatized teachers, teachers who may have lost close family members and friends or who even were injured, deal with traumatized students?

How can trauma be treated when it is never-ending? In Gaza there is no post-traumatic stress, because there is never a time without trauma. It was already an environment filled with chronic traumatic stress disorder before this war. After this year, the trauma will grip generations to come. Thousands of children have lost their lives since the Israeli war on Gaza began on Oct. 8, 2023. Others lost body parts. Others lost their parents. Others lost everyone. Over the last year, doctors working in Gaza began using the abbreviation W.C.N.S.F., for “wounded child, no surviving family.”

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