“They did not want me”: UK universities refuse to help Gaza’s students

Three years into Ibrahim Abusaqer’s dentistry degree at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City, Israel invaded the Gaza Strip, placing his studies on indefinite hold. He had planned to spend the next fifteen years on the long path to becoming a maxillofacial surgeon, which requires both medical and dental degrees, but suddenly, Ibrahim couldn’t think past the next week.

Within days, he and his family were forced to flee Gaza City. Most of them were sure they’d return shortly; Ibrahim was the only one who brought winter clothes. Weeks later, Israeli bombs leveled Al-Azhar University to the ground. The Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) - where Ibrahim’s brother, Yahia, had been studying - was bombed before the ground invasion even began.

Despite the genocide occurring around him, Ibrahim remained determined to become a maxillofacial surgeon, knowing this would mean completing his studies abroad. Among the many impossibilities of studying in Gaza, Ibrahim was now homeless: Israeli bombs having turned the block of flats where he lived into a pile of rubble. But Ibrahim also had emotional reasons for wanting a fresh start. He explained: “When I hear reports of bodies being recovered from the university or nearby, I cannot imagine returning there and studying in that place stained with blood.”

Ibrahim hopes to travel to the UK, US, Ireland or Canada to complete his degree – his unfinished course was taught in English – but as he started to apply to universities, he encountered barriers he had never anticipated.

Limited options

When I began speaking to Ibrahim, he was struggling to get his head around the sheer volume of bureaucratic barriers facing him when applying to British universities through UCAS. 

For most British students, this is a simple process: choose five universities you may want to attend and apply by the end of January. Ibrahim knew he could only apply to institutions with scholarships that would fund, at minimum, his full course fees.

The UK has a severe lack of Palestine-specific scholarships, in spite of the UN-described scholasticide against Gaza’s education sector. By summer 2024, every university in Gaza had been destroyed or damaged, leaving around 90,000 university students without access to formal education. Over 600,000 children have been out of school for more than a year, which is already having a serious effect on literacy among Gaza’s children.

UK universities have been slow to react to the destruction of higher education in Gaza, which will undoubtedly take decades to rebuild. Beyond the British Council’s Higher Education Scholarships for Palestinians (HESPAL) scheme, most of the UK’s scholarships for Palestinian students are recent products of hard fought battles between student activists and their administrations. 

These scholarships, while a clear attempt to heed the call of campus movements, suffer from ill-considered barriers to implementation. For example, the University of Oxford’s Palestine Crisis Scholarship Scheme does not specify how many places are available, is only for master’s-level students, and does not include a concrete plan to help students from Gaza actually access the scholarship if they are awarded it. Many scholarships offered by other institutions are similarly flawed.

Yahia, who was previously studying for a master’s in data science at IUG, was accepted for a master’s programme at the University of St Andrews, but could not take up the place because he didn’t win a HESPAL scholarship.

He explained: “ The thing that pissed me off the most was that they wanted to select only two students from Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, which is unfair. You are putting me against someone who lives in a safe environment with a reliable internet connection.”

Ibrahim, as an undergraduate student, has an even smaller pool of scholarships available to him. At the start of his search in November 2024, there was only one scholarship space specifically for a Palestinian he could apply for in the whole of the UK: the Dima Alhaj scholarship at the University of Glasgow.

Across the UK, the vast majority of Palestinian scholarships are for one-year master’s programmes, which stipulate that the students must return to Palestine upon completing their degree – a policy likely developed to prevent brain drain but also to stop international scholarship schemes from contributing to Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing. These concerns are well-founded: Israeli officials are publicly planning for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza under the guise of “voluntary migration” and, already, evacuees are being forced to sign paperwork preventing their return. And yet, UK universities imposing return requirements upon Palestinian students further restricts their ability to chart their own futures, especially as Gaza remains besieged and destroyed.

They don’t want you

Ibrahim soon discovered another problem. Across the board, UK universities do not recognise the Tawjihi – the exam taken by Palestinian students at the end of high school – as a qualification for university entry, considering it to be equivalent to GCSEs, rather than A Levels. This problem is not unique to Palestinian students. Applicants from the Global South frequently have their existing academic qualifications undervalued when applying to Western universities.

In addition, some universities simply fail to list entry requirements for Palestinian students on their websites. Only after lengthy and often frustrating email exchanges with admissions officers was Ibrahim able to establish his eligibility for first-year entry, despite having already completed three years of degree-level study.

Ibrahim’s older sister Hala, who has an undergraduate degree in biotechnology, found herself jumping through similar hoops in master’s applications for Western universities. For her: “what was most frustrating were the bureaucratic complications, such as requirements for proof of identity or proof of English language”. 

Hala described universities ignoring the barriers Gazan students face in obtaining these documents, particularly when the original copies have been lost or destroyed. 

Even when universities gave Hala additional time to produce the required paperwork, the administrative burden was onerous. She explained: “there are no ministries or institutions in Gaza that notarise documents, so I have to send them to Jerusalem or Ramallah to be notarised or get someone abroad to notarise them." Ibrahim, Hala and Yahia have all struggled to do this required admin with extremely limited resources, managing online application systems on only their phones. Universities were not always understanding about the ways this impacted Hala, she said: “even if I had a laptop, I couldn’t find a quiet place to do the official tests they wanted me to do.”

Yahia has also struggled with the lack of internet access. He told me: “In January last year, when the war was raging without any sign of stopping, I had to risk myself to get a reliable internet connection [for my St Andrews application]”. He says that universities in Turkey and Canada, where a Palestinian-run charity helps students like him continue their studies, have been more understanding. Expressing his sense that this understanding was due only to the advocacy of the charities, he said: “If it’s not someone Arab or Muslim they won’t sympathise with me.”

In the UK, Palestinian-led charities such as Friends of Birzeit University are also pushing universities to take an fairer and more sensitive approach to supporting Palestinian students, that also involves contributing to rebuilding the higher education sector in Gaza. 

However, stringent admissions requirements and bureaucratic barriers imposed on Ibrahim and his siblings show that universities have prioritised the most visible concessions – like the creation of scholarships – without a holistic approach that acknowledges the barriers to entry for Gazan applicants.  

While students like Ibrahim, who rely on scholarships to continue their education, struggle to even meet admissions requirements, UK universities – against a backdrop of neoliberalisation across the higher education sector – increasingly market themselves to fee-paying international students, whose inflated fees make up for insufficient public funding. 

With very few students from Gaza able to self-fund degrees in the UK, there is little incentive for UK universities to lessen their many administrative barriers to admission. Indeed, it seems the fewer scholarships granted, the more places are available to fee-paying applicants.

The medical problem

The prejudiced application process is exacerbated by Ibrahim’s choice of degree; UK universities have a separate, earlier deadline for medical and dental students, which was inflexible, and Ibrahim never heard about until it had already passed.

Despite having completed three years of his dentistry degree, Ibrahim has not been able to find a university in the UK, Ireland, US or Canada, that would accept him as a first-year dental or medical student. If he had been able to, many of the scholarships Ibrahim is seeking explicitly exclude lengthy undergraduate degrees like medicine, dentistry and architecture. This problem is not limited to Western universities. Ibrahim applied for a scholarship in Qatar that similarly excluded medicine and dentistry courses.

With over 1,400 healthcare workers killed in Gaza since October 2023, it is vital that the next generation of medics are able to complete their training. Ibrahim explained: “Even before the war, there was a shortage of specialists. Healthcare is the most crucial service for people in Gaza, not just during the genocide but after this.”

Ibrahim ultimately applied for a mixture of courses through UCAS, none of them in medicine or dentistry. 

He is worried about the long-term impact on patients if his generation of medical and dental students are unable to complete their studies. He told me: “Lately, I’ve seen many students shift to different fields…simply to avoid losing hope for the future.” He ultimately became one of these students.

Vanishing hopes

Ibrahim’s UCAS choices were determined first and foremost by the available scholarships. He applied for computer science with a foundation year (considered necessary because his dentistry degree didn’t include maths instruction) at Glasgow, Manchester and UCL, and made second applications to Glasgow and Manchester, for nursing and public health respectively.

After months of agonising over his application, it should have been a relief to submit, but Ibrahim soon found himself fighting fires.

He received a quick rejection from UCL and discovered the course he applied for was only open to UK-based applicants. After several appeals – during which he was repeatedly told he should simply apply elsewhere – the university agreed to consider him for another course, but he was rejected from that one as well.

“They insisted I don’t qualify without any explanation,” said Ibrahim. “They closed all the doors in my face.”

Of all the British universities Ibrahim applied to, he found UCL the least compassionate in its correspondence. This is echoed in the university’s silence after Israel killed the poet, journalist and IUG professor, Dr. Refaat Alareer, who was an alumnus of the London institution. Alareer and six of his relatives were killed in an Israeli airstrike on his home in December 2023, a fact the university has not officially acknowledged, never mind condemned, despite protests from students and faculty.

After UCL’s rejection, Ibrahim received another: this time forcomputer science at Glasgow. Ibrahim texted me when he learned the bad news: “How can they reject me for foundation year!!”

Though not through UCAS, he had also applied to Leeds, again for computer science with a foundation year. The university had announced five scholarships to undergraduate or master’s students from Gaza in December, and Ibrahim was accepted onto the course. It seemed like his best shot at a scholarship.

However, after the application deadline had passed, Leeds changed its scholarship criteria to be for master’s students only. lbrahim was devastated: “I applied as they advised me, I spent a lot of hours on this application”. Lamenting the loss of opportunity for undergraduates, he said: “They made us cling to nothing.”

The barrage of bad news continued. In March, Ibrahim learned had not passed the the English-language test Manchester made him take to be admitted to the university. 

The day after Israel’s first major bombing raids that marked the end of the most recent ceasefire, Ibrahim snuck out to borrow a laptop and take the scheduled test. He was using low-quality headphones and hadn’t slept the previous night as bombs fell overhead.

His lowest score was for speaking; his examiner marked him down for having “a strong, intrusive non-English accent”. When he complained to the university, it insisted it sympathised with the issues he faced in taking the test but could not offer him another try. Complaints about the examiner’s racism went unaddressed. He was told to take another different test, which would require him to pay out-of-pocket and likely attend a testing centre outside of Gaza.

A box they designed

Even Ibrahim’s most positive experience of a UK university – with Goldsmiths, who offered him first-year admission for Computer Science – has been complicated. Their scholarship was only announced after the undergraduate admissions deadline, meaning Ibrahim had to ask permission from UCAS to make it one of his choices.

Dealings with UK universities left Ibrahim extremely demoralised. He argued: “Students here lost their universities and home and everything. UK universities should take that into consideration, but it feels like there are opportunities only for those who fit inside a box they designed.”

While he hasn’t learned the outcome of his scholarship applications in the UK, Ibrahim was offered a scholarship from a university on the West Coast of the US. He has accepted it, but is now struggling to find a way to get out of Gaza at all, never mind travel to America.

Yahia, who has won two scholarships in Canada and Turkey but also remains in Gaza, is matter-of-fact about the impact university applications have had on him: “So much shit happened in the war that has destroyed my mental health. You can’t destroy someone who already got destroyed multiple times.”

Hala, frustrated by “the limited opportunities due to circumstances beyond [her] control”, received an offer to study her master’s at the University of Ghent in Belgium, but she cannot accept, as she was not offered a scholarship. 

The reality is that to continue their studies, Ibrahim, Hala and Yahia, along with many other Palestinian students, don’t just need to gain university acceptance and scholarship funding, they need to be able to freely leave and return to Gaza, a fundamental right that the occupation has long denied them. Ibrahim knows students who won scholarships to US universities a year ago but remain trapped in Gaza.

The Rafah Crossing into Egypt has been closed for many months, but recently Ibrahim says several people have been able to leave Gaza by travelling through Israel and into Jordan. Reports in Israeli media confirm the existence of this possible route. Ireland has successfully negotiated for a small number of students with scholarships at Irish universities to leave Gaza this way, but it has largely been reserved for dual nationals and medical evacuations.

Despite restrictions on his movement and unjust university policies Ibrahim perseveres. “I can’t afford to stop trying,” he says. “What other option do I have?”

Please consider donating to Ibrahim and his family’s Gofundme, linked here ▼

Sasha Baker is a member of the Vashti Cooperative and a freelance investigative journalist.