Accepted but trapped: Why won’t the UK evacuate its students from Gaza?
The Gaza Strip as seen from a French military aircraft before humanitarian aid is airdropped over it, 3 August 2025
Logain Hamdan writes in Al Jazeera on 6 August 2025:
In September 2025, I am supposed to start a new life, not in war-torn Gaza, but in a lecture hall in the United Kingdom. After nearly a year of endless efforts, applications, exams, and navigating bombings, displacement and blackout zones just to apply, I was accepted. Not once, but five times, by the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Exeter, and Ulster. I even secured funding.
But instead of boarding a plane, I remain trapped in Gaza, a place where war has flattened homes, stolen futures and caged dreams. The bombs have not stopped. Neither has our will. Unlike students in other war-torn areas, we, Gaza Palestinian students, are not being offered any path out. Many countries, such as France, Ireland and Italy, have successfully evacuated their students through government-coordinated efforts and humanitarian corridors, like via the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). These governments made it clear that their students matter. The UK has not. Despite its global standing and historic reputation for championing justice and education, it remains silent.
This is not just my story. It is a collective cry from dozens of us, admitted to top British universities, with scholarships or personal savings, who survived bombs and sieges only to be abandoned at the final border: there is no visa centre in Gaza to submit fingerprints, and no route out without evacuation.
After the war broke out in late 2023, I was forced to pause my online university studies, as both the classes and the fees became impossible to maintain under the siege. But I did not give up on education. Instead, I began applying to UK universities through UCAS, a process that demanded a carefully written personal statement, recommendation letters, detailed documentation and weeks of waiting. I submitted everything using borrowed internet in relatives’ homes or from paid co-working spaces that I reached on foot, under the midday sun or pouring rain, with no transportation. There were days when I sat on a plastic chair in the street, emailing colleges and researching entry requirements while missiles flew overhead.
When universities asked for English qualification submissions, I had no centre in Gaza to support me, not for training, not even to register. Most UK universities would not accept Duolingo, the only test I could afford and access online. So I stretched every resource and applied for each institution’s approved test, juggling freelance mobile programming by day to support myself and studying English by night, often under a mobile flashlight.
Some tests required constant camera and microphone monitoring, difficult in a war zone where displacement, noise and unstable internet made focus nearly impossible. One infraction and the test would be void. My laptop battery often died before the test ended. But I endured and succeeded.