The girls in the Gaza school photograph

Just before the genocide, 15 Gaza schoolgirls posed for a photograph. Three years on, Al Jazeera went looking for them. Save Share Nuseirat, Gaza Strip —Maha Taha fills the old blackboard with equations and sets her students to work. For the next few minutes, the classroom settles into the scratch of pens and the low murmur of girls working through the problems. Maha, 43, has taught mathematics for 20 years. Dressed in an olive-green jalabeya and beige hijab, she steps quietly to her desk at the side of the room, as her students work through the maths problems. She has watched generations of girls pass through her classroom, preparing for exams and applying to universities. Asked about the girls she taught before the October 7 genocide began, Maha pauses before reaching for her phone. While scrolling back to find a photograph taken in June 2023, she speaks softly, so as not to disturb the girls in the classroom. “I was proud of them," she says. "I could see that they had bright futures ahead of them. They were very special in their personalities, even before it came to their studies. But October 7 changed the course of their lives.” In the photo, 15 teenage girls in navy school robes and white scarves crowd around Maha in the schoolyard. Some have their arms around one another; others lean towards the camera. All are smiling. They had just finished their mock exams and wanted a photograph together. Sara Rayan took it, holding out the phone so everyone fit in the frame. The girls were 17 and 18. Like many teenagers their age, they worried about exams and university places, talked about what they wanted to become, and imagined the lives that lay ahead. Four months later, Israel's war on Gaza began. Three years on, one of the girls in the photograph has been killed in an Israeli air strike. Four have left Gaza. Others have been displaced - their education interrupted and their plans for the future upended. Al Jazeera set out to find the 15 girls, to discover what had happened to them and the futures they once imagined, and to see whether they could be brought together again for a photograph in the same schoolyard. Muscat Secondary School is still standing, although it was struck by artillery in February 2024 and became a shelter for displaced families. Some classrooms still bear the marks of the war: holes left by quadcopter gunfire, windows damaged by shelling and soot stains where families cooked over open fires....