When Niveen al-Gharabli set out to find firewood amid the wreckage of displacement, survival was her only immediate goal. Fuel was scarce. Cooking and keeping warm required desperate measures. But beneath the concrete slabs, twisted iron, and dust, she kept finding something unexpected. Books.
Instead of feeding them to the fire, she started picking them up. She dusted them off, carried them back to her makeshift tent, and began what would become an extraordinary act of defiance against intellectual erasure.
Finding Books Where Firewood Was the Priority
In Gaza, war doesn't just destroy buildings; it systematically guts the infrastructure of daily life, including schools, universities, and libraries. When educational spaces are flattened, books are treated as disposable debris. Niveen saw things differently.
Working alongside her husband Raouf, she began salvaging every readable volume she encountered during her search for fuel. What started as an instinctive rescue mission quickly transformed into a community lifeline. She brought the salvaged texts back, cleaned off the soot and moisture, and arranged them carefully.
People began to notice. Displaced students, parents, and readers started walking long distances to reach her makeshift book stall. They weren't just looking for casual reading material. They were looking for a way to hold onto normalcy.
Why Grassroots Education Initiatives Matter Now
Formal schooling systems have largely collapsed across the strip. Classrooms are gone. Digital access is erratic at best due to severe power outages and connectivity destruction. In this vacuum, grassroots knowledge sharing has stepped in.
Niveen’s initiative—often referred to affectionately by locals who call her Umm al-Ghalaba—operates on trust and necessity. Books are made available for a nominal fee of two shekels for those who can afford it, but for students with nothing, they are given away entirely for free. Readers simply borrow them and bring them back when they're finished.
It’s an informal network of survival, driven entirely by individual initiative rather than institutional funding.
The Battle Against Cultural Erasure
History shows that authoritarian powers and occupying forces often target archives, libraries, and universities to fracture a society's collective memory. When you cut off a generation from its curriculum and literature, you compromise its future.
That is why saving books from the rubble is an act of resistance. Volunteers and individuals across Gaza—from young women rescuing rare manuscripts from historic libraries to mothers organizing street-side book stalls—are fighting a race against time and the elements. Winter rains, humidity, and ruined structures threaten the few texts that survive initial bombardments.
Yet, the determination remains fierce. As Niveen puts it, the goal is simple: don't let destruction win. By keeping learning alive under canvas tents and amid concrete ruins, these grassroots efforts prove that while classrooms can be flattened, the appetite for education cannot be bombed out of existence.
