By Aya Elsehaimy

Yousef Abu Rabee planting seeds in front of the ruins of his home in Beit Lahiya, Gaza, March 31, 2024, Yousef Abu Rabee’s Facebook page.

Yousef Abu Rabee was an alumnus of Al-Azhar University and a student of Professor Ahmed Abu Shaban at the King Hassan II Faculty of Agriculture and Veterinary Sciences. He was born in Beit Lahiya, a neighborhood at the northern tip of the Gaza Strip famous for its strawberry fields and fertile land. He came from a family of farmers who have known, planted, and cultivated the land for generations. Passionate about agriculture and continuing his family’s legacy, Abu Rabee found himself in search of answers during his studies to find innovative ways to farm under harsh conditions of land restriction and water scarcity imposed by the two-decade-long Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip. He pursued his bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Engineering with a specialization in Agronomy (field crop production and soil management). He was passionate about farming and agriculture not only as a means of survival, but also as a way to empower dignity and self-sufficiency within his community. In his own words in an interview with the Ramallah-based Ma‘an Center for Development, Abu Rabee described farming as “not just an idea, but an instinct” inside him and all the farmers in the region. Learning and teaching sustainable farming was a mission and a calling, especially as the Israeli-imposed Buffer Zone encroached on arable land in the Gaza strip, rendering 35% of it unsafe for Palestinians to farm (including much of Beit Lahiya), and destroying close to 46% of the already limited arable land as early as 2008-2009 during Operation Cast Lead and further during repeated military assaults.

Despite the challenges, Abu Rabee put his ancestral and academic knowledge to use in Beit Lahiya. Together with his community, he managed to expand their strawberry crops to 4,500 dunams (4.5 km²) in 2023, his family’s largest since 1967. The war deprived them of reaping the fruits of their labor at the end of the year. In October 2023, Abu Rabee was only two months away from harvesting his strawberry crops and one semester away from graduating with his Bachelor of Science degree. Immediately after October 7th, the residents of Beit Lahiya fell under indiscriminate Israeli bombardment reminiscent of previous attacks they had experienced under siege and occupation, but with the scale growing to unprecedented and catastrophic heights as the days went on. They were forced to flee their homes and their farmlands within 24 hours as the bombing intensified. Abu Rabee and his family evacuated to the Jabalia Refugee Camp after an F-16 warplane bombed the house next door and killed their neighbors. It would not be the last of their displacements, as they had to evacuate again in November, walking for hours on foot with nowhere to go. “With every displacement,” he told Al-Mayadeen, “we lost more of our basic needs and our humanity.” 

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By Moon Younes

Written in honor of her legacy

Education does not always unfold in classrooms. It can live in kitchens, shelters, or on phone screens—any place where a person insists on sharing knowledge, care, and hope. In Gaza, where schools are rubble and childhoods cut short, education persists in unexpected forms. Against the background of the ongoing genocide, a child can be driven to take up the mantle of teacher.

Yaqeen Hammad has been described as Gaza’s youngest influencer. She has been called a journalist and a humanitarian, but she was above all a teacher. She was a living indictment of the system that demanded a child to take on these roles, as they suffer the heaviest price of the ongoing genocide. The Israeli extermination campaign against Gaza has deliberately robbed children of their childhoods, destroying their classrooms and rewriting the rhythms of their lives with displacement, siege, starvation, and fear. In this broken landscape, Yaqeen stepped forward—not as a symbol, but as a young girl with immense heart and remarkable clarity—to teach and influence her people towards hope.

Yaqeen created joy with whatever tools she could find: firewood, dates, a smartphone. With these, she taught children how to cook without gas, how to conserve and purify water, and how to smile—gently, defiantly—despite the trauma surrounding them. She showed the world how Gaza’s people were rebuilding their lives, how water was sourced, cleaned, and shared, how resilience took the form of mutual aid. Alongside her brother Mohamed, she distributed food, toys, and clothes to displaced families, embodying a spirit of generosity well beyond her years. Her charisma, reminiscent of international television host Ahmad Al-Shugairi, lent her videos a tone of confident warmth and educational tact—even borrowing soundtracks from his program to highlight Gaza’s ingenuity amidst devastation. Though her reach mirrored that of a child star, her calling was that of a teacher. She did more than document survival—she modeled it. Not because anyone told her to, but because everything else had been stripped away. And in that void, she rose, not with bitterness, but with responsibility. When hope thinned, she handed it out freely. This is what it meant, in Gaza, for a child to become a teacher.

Yaqeen was killed by an Israeli airstrike on May 23, 2025, in her family’s shelter in Al-Baraka, Deir al-Balah, already a site of severe displacement and scarcity. She was eleven years old.

This essay honors her life and the children of Gaza who, like her, are forced to grow up too soon—to carry the impossible weight of teaching, surviving, and leading before they have been allowed to learn and live.

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