--- title: "Aya’s white coat, kept in bags of ash" description: "Three years after a Gaza school photograph, the girl who wanted to be a neurosurgeon studies medicine from ruins" author: "Jan Sokol" published: 2026-10-09T10:23:42Z modified: 2026-10-09T23:35:50Z url: https://rews.cc/a/aya-s-white-coat-kept-in-bags-of-ash-5d8e2e language: en tags: ["gaza", "war", "education", "health", "refugees", "mideast"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Aya’s white coat, kept in bags of ash *Three years after a Gaza school photograph, the girl who wanted to be a neurosurgeon studies medicine from ruins* By Jan Sokol · October 9, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/aya-s-white-coat-kept-in-bags-of-ash-5d8e2e ## In brief - Al Jazeera traced 15 girls from a pre-war Gaza school photograph, including would-be neurosurgeon Aya Adnan - Aya scored 96% in her final school exams but, unable to afford medicine, enrolled in medical laboratory sciences - Her brother Yasser, a 32-year-old lawyer and father of three, was killed in a December 12 strike on the damaged family home - Days later Aya recovered the charred university supplies Yasser had bought her, including pens and three pages of lecture notes - She now studies the hands-on discipline online, without laboratories or equipment, whenever power and internet allow There is a photograph from before, and there is a photograph from now. Between the two lie three years of war, a dead brother, a house that stood in Nuseirat for more than 35 years and no longer stands whole, and a girl who still intends, somehow, to wear a white coat. [Al Jazeera’s Lina Ghassan Abu Zayed tracked down](https://aljazeera.com/features/longform/2026/10/9/the-girls-in-the-gaza-school-photograph) fifteen schoolgirls from the old picture; among them is Aya Adnan, tall, with a dimple in her chin, her hijab falling behind her shoulders — the same girl who had planned to become a neurosurgeon. ## The second father Aya liked studying the way some people like breathing. She came early for extra physics lessons and worked at difficult material until it gave way. She had noticed how few female surgeons Gaza had, and she did not care to be told that surgery was too demanding for women. In the 11th grade neurology stopped being an abstraction: a headache and dizziness that lasted 24 hours, scans, a specialist, the explanation that pressure from the vertebrae of her neck was bearing on her spinal cord. “It felt like my head was heavier than my body,” she recalls, “as if it might fall off.” She finished school with 96 percent, and then met the oldest of obstacles — money. Medicine was expensive, and her father, an UNRWA social worker, could not comfortably pay. So she turned to Yasser. Her brother was seventeen years older, a lawyer with his own practice, a wife, and three children — Adnan, nine, Ahmad, seven, and three-year-old Ilaf. He helped support their parents and hoped one day to teach law at a university. “I used to always tell him, ‘You’re a second father to me,’ because he was so kind to me, just like my father,” Aya says. ## A summer’s day in August 2023 One day that August, still in his smart work clothes, Yasser drove her from Nuseirat to the Islamic University of Gaza. They went from department to department looking for a course she would enjoy that the family could afford. Professors suggested engineering; outside, she told him she could not see herself among computers. “I could picture myself wearing a white coat, that’s all.” They tried health sciences. Medical laboratory sciences appealed to her. Yasser understood that his sister was surrendering the university of her imagination, and refused to let her treat the surrender as an ending. “Perhaps it’s for the best,” he told her. “Maybe one day you’ll become a doctor in the field you choose to specialise in. You don’t have to be a medical doctor; you could become a university professor with a PhD.” > He told me, ‘Sometimes what is withheld from us can be better for us than what is given to us,’ and I believe him. He took her to lunch at Al-Taboun restaurant, and they talked on about choices. She enrolled in medical laboratory sciences; he bought her books and supplies. The university had barely completed its first week when the war began. ## The last conversation A strike on a neighbouring two-storey house badly damaged the family home in Nuseirat, and the family of more than three decades at that address moved into an aunt’s house. The new timetable that had occupied Aya weeks earlier simply vanished. Her days reorganised themselves around water, food, and a fire she did not know how to build, because she had never needed to. Yasser kept returning to the wounded house in Nuseirat, partly to check on what remained, partly out of the old fear that possessions left in a half-ruin end up stolen. Sometimes he stayed the night. On one visit he asked Aya to come along. There were dishes to wash, floors to sweep, rooms to set in order. She said she could not; she was helping their mother prepare food. On December 12, as the family gathered for afternoon prayers at the aunt’s house, they heard a missile strike. Minutes later a friend phoned, asked where everyone was, and then asked about Yasser. He had gone back to the damaged house alone. The strike had hit it. He was 32. It was an ordinary exchange between brother and sister, the kind no one bothers to store away. Come with me. I can’t. She has returned to it again and again, because insignificant words, once they become the last ones, cease to be insignificant. In wars the powerful negotiate territories and ceasefires at long tables; what the ruled are left to negotiate is memory — which sentence was final, and what it meant. ## Three surviving pages About a week after the strike, Aya went back to the house and found what was left of the plastic shopping bags that had held the university supplies Yasser bought her a few months before. She shook off dust and ash and opened them one by one. “I was surprised I found them at all; they reminded me of Yasser,” she says. Some books had survived. Others were almost entirely burned — from one set of lecture notes, three pages remained. Ballpoint pens, markers and coloured pencils lay among the notes. She gathered what remained, and she still has it. Eighteen months into the war, when Gaza’s universities began offering remote learning, Aya logged on whenever electricity and an internet connection allowed — the two conditions that now stand where entrance exams once stood. Hers is, by design, a hands-on discipline: equipment, experiments, laboratories. She studies it with none of these. “My major is very practical, and most of its courses are practical,” she says. “It was difficult for me to study them online when I wasn’t even at the university, and there were no laboratories or equipment in front of me.” She keeps going. And, the reporting notes, so does another girl from that photograph, who also once imagined herself in a white coat.