Behind a Gaza School Photo: A Dead Student, a Martyred Lawyer and an Interrupted Medical Dream

In June 2023, in Nuseirat in central Gaza, 15 female secondary school students and their teacher Maha Taha gathered for a group photo at Muscat Girls' School. In the frame, they stood in a row, smiling the way girls their age are meant to smile.

A few months later, Israel's military campaign in Gaza was launched in full—a war widely recognized as genocide that cut short futures these girls had barely begun to live.

An Al Jazeera long-form report traces their fates over the three years that followed, showing not only where a handful of faces ended up, but how the family, teachers, friends and prospects of a Palestinian girl can be erased, one airstrike at a time.

Sixth from the left in the photo is Lina Al-Hour. According to Al Jazeera reporting, she was killed in an Israeli airstrike in November 2023.

Aya Adnan, who stands in the new group photo, is tall, with shallow dimples beneath her chin and a headscarf draped over her shoulders. Three years ago she dreamed of university and of becoming a doctor—a neurosurgeon if possible. That ambition was tied to an episode in her first year of high school when a headache and dizziness lasted 24 hours: an MRI scan showed that pressure in her cervical spine was affecting her spinal cord.

"It felt as if my head was heavier than the rest of my body, as if it was about to fall off," she recalled.

She studied hard, arriving early at school for extra physics lessons and grinding away at difficult problems until she understood them. She also noticed how few female surgeons there were in Gaza, and refused to listen when people said things like "surgery is too tiring for women."

At the end of secondary school, Aya scored 96 percent. But medical school tuition was expensive, and she could not afford it. Her father was a social worker with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Aya turned to her elder brother Yasser—17 years her senior—a practicing lawyer who ran his own firm and was the father of three: nine-year-old Adnan, seven-year-old Ahmad and three-year-old Ilaf. Yasser also helped support their parents and had once hoped to one day teach law at a university.

"I used to tell him, 'You are like a second father to me,' because he was so good to me, the same as my father," Aya said.

According to Al Jazeera reporting, on a summer day in August 2023, Yasser, still in his work shirt, drove Aya from Nuseirat to the Islamic University of Gaza. The two went from faculty to faculty, looking for a course she could afford and that interested her. Professors suggested engineering. When Aya came out, she told her brother she could not imagine herself studying computers or becoming an engineer.

"I can only picture myself in a white coat," she told him.

They turned instead to health sciences.

"Maybe I can study something in medicine. I really like medical laboratory sciences," Aya said.

Yasser knew his sister was giving up the university she had imagined for herself, but he would not let her see it as an ending.

"Maybe it's for the best," he said. "Maybe one day you'll become a doctor in the field you choose. You don't have to be a clinician. You can do a PhD and become a university professor."

He gave her a line she would return to again and again: "He told me, 'Sometimes what we don't get is actually better for us than what we do get.' I believe him."

The siblings then had lunch at Al-Taboun restaurant, continuing to talk about university and the options ahead. Aya eventually enrolled in medical laboratory sciences, and Yasser bought her full set of textbooks. Less than a week into the term, the war began.

A strike hit a two-story residential building next door, severely damaging the family home they had lived in for 35 years in Nuseirat, and they moved in temporarily with an aunt. The university timetable that had once occupied all of Aya's thoughts had been her whole life only weeks earlier; now her days were reduced to fetching water, helping in the kitchen and learning to cook without the conditions she had always taken for granted. She didn't know how to light a fire, because she had never needed to.

Yasser still went back to the damaged family home from time to time, in part to check on what remained, in part because he was afraid their belongings would be stolen. Sometimes he stayed there alone.

Once, he asked Aya to come along—there were dishes to wash, floors to sweep, rooms to tidy. Aya said she couldn't go; she had to help her mother prepare the meal.

According to Al Jazeera reporting, on the afternoon of December 12, 2023, the family was gathered for Friday prayers at their aunt's house when they heard the roar of a missile falling. A few minutes later, a friend called, first asking where the family was, then asking about Yasser, who had gone back alone to the family home. The airstrike hit the house. Yasser was killed. He was 32.

Aya kept replaying that conversation in which Yasser had asked her to come to the old house and she had said she couldn't. It was the most ordinary kind of exchange between siblings, the kind that doesn't need to be remembered—and yet it became their last.

About a week later, Aya returned to the family home and dug her textbooks out of the rubble. Yasser had bought them only months earlier, and they were still in the plastic bag he had given her. She dusted off the ash and soot and opened them one by one.

"I was surprised they were still there. They made me think of Yasser," she said.

Some of the books had survived; the rest were almost burned up—one set of lecture notes had only three pages left. Ballpoint pens, markers and colored pencils were scattered among them. Aya gathered them up and kept them as keepsakes.

Eighteen months later, as universities gradually began offering remote classes, Aya logged on during the hours when electricity and internet were available. Medical laboratory sciences is by nature a heavily practical discipline—it requires equipment, experiments, laboratories. Yet she had to complete her studies without any of those things.

"My specialization is very hands-on. Most of my courses are practical. Studying online without being at school, without labs and equipment, is extremely difficult," she said.

She did not give up. Another girl in the photo who had once dreamed of putting on a white coat is also still holding on.

According to Al Jazeera's account, of the 15 girls in the photo, 4 have left Gaza; the rest could not be reached or chose not to take part in a reunion; Lina Al-Hour was killed in an airstrike in November 2023.