Dana Shabat, 18, walks roughly an hour each day to reach a café in Gaza where she can sit her high school final exams — a journey that, in ordinary circumstances, would take minutes to a school building. Al Jazeera reported her situation on 27 June 2026: displaced, living under canvas, and still attempting to complete the tawjihi, the Palestinian matriculation examination that functions as the gateway to higher education and formal employment.

Shabat's commute is a measure of how thoroughly the war has dismantled the infrastructure of learning in Gaza. Every school in the Strip closed following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023 and the Israeli military campaign that followed, according to AP reporting from May 2024. That closure has now stretched across nearly three academic years, affecting hundreds of thousands of students at every level. For those approaching the tawjihi — a high-stakes, nationally standardised exam — the consequences are acute: missing it is not simply a year's delay but a disruption to the entire sequencing of adult life.

Improvised Pathways to Certification

Administering public exams in an active conflict zone requires workarounds that test the limits of institutional capacity. For students who crossed into Egypt, the Palestinian embassy in Cairo moved to supervise end-of-year exams for approximately 800 students, Reuters reported in May 2024. The actual uptake exceeded those projections: by late June 2024, an estimated 1,090 Gaza high school students had sat exams in Cairo after being displaced across the Rafah crossing, per Reuters. Those numbers reflect the cohort that managed to leave. For those who remained — the majority — the options were far more constrained.

Café-based exam centres represent one improvised answer to that constraint. They offer a physical address, a degree of separation from the chaos of displacement camps, and — crucially — power and connectivity in a territory where both are intermittent. That they have become the de facto examination halls for Gaza's tawjihi class says something precise about the state of civil infrastructure across the Strip.

The Structural Challenge Behind the Individual Story

The Palestinian Ministry of Education, in partnership with UNICEF, launched a Back to Learning Programme to expand non-formal learning pathways, UNICEF reported in January 2026. Non-formal learning — community-based instruction outside accredited school buildings — is an established humanitarian education tool, but it carries real limits for students pursuing credentials that require formal certification. The tawjihi is not a non-formal qualification; it is a state-administered exam whose results feed directly into university admissions across the Arab world. Getting students to the point of sitting it, in whatever venue, requires a functioning examination authority, physical security, and basic logistics. All three are fragile in current conditions.

The cohort that Shabat represents is, in demographic terms, a significant one. Gazans displaced since October 2023 include a large proportion of young people whose entire secondary education has now been conducted — or interrupted — during active hostilities. The long-term credential gap this creates is not simply an individual hardship; it is a structural problem for any post-conflict reconstruction effort, which will require a workforce with documented qualifications.

The question of educational continuity in protracted conflict is not new to the region. Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan have for decades navigated dual curricula — UNRWA's alongside host-country systems — with complex portability consequences. Gaza's situation differs in that the Palestinian Authority's own examination infrastructure is attempting to function inside the conflict zone rather than from outside it, a distinction that shapes both the legitimacy of the credentials and the logistical strain on the administering body.

What is visible in Shabat's daily walk — the hour each way, the café, the exam paper — is one student's determination to maintain her place in a credentialling system that the war has not fully dismantled but has made nearly impossible to access. Whether the Ministry of Education and its international partners can sustain that system for the full cohort through a conflict now entering its fourth year remains the operative question.