The girls in the Gaza school photograph

Aya Adnan stands with the three in the new photograph, tall, with a dimple in her chin and her hijab falling behind her shoulders.Three years earlier, she had been looking forward to university. She wanted to become a doctor, preferably a neurosurgeon.Aya enjoyed studying. She arrived early for extra physics lessons and worked through difficult material until she understood it. She had also noticed how few female surgeons there were in Gaza and disliked hearing that surgery was too demanding a profession for women.Her interest in neurology had become personal in the 11th grade, when she suffered a severe headache and dizziness that lasted 24 hours.“It felt like my head was heavier than my body,” she recalls, “as if it might fall off.”After undergoing scans and seeing a neurologist, she was told pressure from the vertebrae in her neck was affecting her spinal cord. The experience only made her more determined to study neurology.When her final school results came, she had scored 96 percent.But studying medicine was expensive, and the family - her father was an UNRWA social worker - could not comfortably afford the fees.Aya turned to her older brother Yasser.Seventeen years her senior...