GAZA CITY--A boy's lilting song filled the tent in Gaza City, above an instrumental melody and backing singers' quiet harmonies, soft music that floated into streets these days more attuned to the deadly beat of bombs and bullets.
The young students were taking part in a lesson given on August 4 by teachers from the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, who have continued classes from displacement camps and shattered buildings even after Israel's bombardments forced them to abandon the school's main building in the city.
"When I play I feel like I'm flying away," said Rifan al-Qassas, 15, who started learning the oud, an Arab lute, when she was nine. She hopes to one day play abroad."Music gives me hope and eases my fear."
Al-Qassas hopes to one day play abroad, she said during a weekend class at the heavily shelled Gaza College, a school in Gaza City. Israel's military again pounded parts of the city on August 12, with more than 120 people killed over the past few days, Gazan health authorities say.
The conservatory was founded in the West Bank and had been a cultural lifeline for Gaza ever since it opened a branch there 13 years ago, teaching classical music along with popular genres, until Israel launched its war on the Mediterranean enclave in response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks.Before the fighting, Israel sometimes granted the best students exit permits to travel outside Gaza to play in the Palestine Youth Orchestra, the conservatory's touring ensemble. Others performed inside Gaza, giving concerts in both Arabic and Western traditions.
After 22 months of bombardment, some of the students are now dead, said Suhail Khoury, the conservatory's president, including 14-year-old violinist Lubna Alyaan, killed along with her family early in the war. The school's old home lies in ruins, according to a video released in January by a teacher. Walls had collapsed and rooms were littered with debris. A grand piano had disappeared.
Reuters asked the Israeli military about the damage. The military declined to comment without more details, which Reuters could not establish.
During last week's session, over a dozen students gathered under the tent's rustling plastic sheets to practice on instruments carefully preserved through the war and to join together in song and music."No fig leaf will wither inside us," the boy sang, a line from a popular lament about Palestinian loss through generations of displacement since the 1948 creation of Israel.
Three female students practised the song Greensleeves on guitar outside the tent, while another group of boys were tapping out rhythms on Middle Eastern hand drums.Few instruments have survived the fighting, said Fouad Khader, who coordinates the revived classes for the conservatory. Teachers have bought some from other displaced people for the students to use. But some of these have been smashed during bombardment, he said.
Instructors have experimented with making their own percussion instruments from empty cans and containers to train children, Khader said.
Early last year, Ahmed Abu Amsha, a guitar and violin teacher with a big beard and a broad smile, was among the first of the conservatory's scattered teachers and students who began offering classes again, playing guitar in the evenings among the tents of displaced people in the south of Gaza, where much of the 2.1 million population had been forced to move by Israeli evacuation orders and bombing.
Then, after a ceasefire began in January, Abu Amsha, 43, was among the tens of thousands of people who moved back north to Gaza City, much of which has been flattened by Israeli bombing.
For the past six months, he has been living and working in the city's central district, along with colleagues teaching oud, guitar, hand drums and the ney, a reed flute, to students able to reach them in the tents or shell-pocked buildings of Gaza College. They also go into kindergartens for sessions with small children.
Teachers are also offering music lessons in southern and central Gaza with 12 musicians and three singing tutors instructing nearly 600 students across the enclave in June, the conservatory said.
Abu Amsha said teachers and parents of students were currently "deeply concerned" about being uprooted again after the Israeli cabinet's August 8 decision to take control of Gaza City. Israel has not said when it will launch the new offensive.
