Region | Palestinian Territories
Blockade traps Palestinian graduate students
As academic years gear up around the world, hundreds of college and graduate students here grow increasingly desperate.
- Agencies
- Published: 23:54 September 1, 2008
Gaza City: As academic years gear up around the world, hundreds of college and graduate students here grow increasingly desperate.
Israel's decision to virtually seal the Gaza Strip after Hamas took control last summer has made them partners in frustrated ambitions and pawns in a larger political struggle.
"I think I'm going to lose [my scholarship], and then I'm going to check right into the asylum," said Wael Al Daya, who was accepted to the doctorate programme in international finance at Britain's University of Bradford. "It's a long struggle just to obtain a scholarship. So to do all that and gain it, and then lose it."
Trickles of individual students - 58 so far this summer, according to Israel - have been permitted to leave to study overseas. But Daya, the coordinator of Gaza's Trapped Student Committee, gives a rough estimate of at least 600 students accepted to foreign universities.
That number, he said, is probably low and doesn't take into account a new dynamic: students with ambitions to study abroad who didn't bother to apply.
The plight of Gaza's students drew unusually direct comments from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in May.
"If you cannot engage young people and give them a complete horizon to their expectations and to their dreams, then I don't know that there would be any future for Palestine," she said.
Shift
Following Rice's comments, Israeli policy shifted slightly. A June 7 letter written by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to a parliament member states that "a few exceptions were approved" after the request of "international actors".
According to the letter, Israel would begin "responding positively to requests from friendly countries".
But for the students stuck in Gaza, talk is cheap and time is running out.
"It's not yet too late, but it's getting close," said Sari Bashi, executive director of the Gisha Legal Centre for Freedom of Movement, a private Israeli group that has lobbied against the closure policy. "The problem is urgent right now, and the response offered is woefully inadequate."
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