LONDON: A Palestinian teenager has said she is “stuck in hell” after being denied the chance to leave Gaza and join her mother in the UK.
Dania Alafranji, 16, was offered a place to study in England at Reddam House school 18 months ago but has yet to be given a UK visa. She has studied online in Gaza for two years and hopes to pursue a career in cybersecurity.
Alafranji was set to travel to the UK under the Nsouli Scholars Programme, but her family has since been “going in circles” trying to get her out of Gaza, where she cannot pursue her education because of the war.
“Everything was relatively normal, then suddenly we found ourselves stuck in hell,” she told The Guardian. “We can’t learn here, 90 percent of the schools and universities here have been destroyed, and the rest are used as shelters. The war is not my fault, and it’s not the fault of the other 600,000 Gazan students.”
She described Gaza as being “like an oven, and the fire is burning us not just from the outside but the inside as well.”
So far, the UK has only accepted students from Gaza on the Chevening Scholarship scheme, which is a one-year program for university-age students.
But Alafranji’s family said in the past the UK allowed students from warzones under the age of 18 to study in the country, including from Ukraine.
Several students from Gaza the same age as Alafranji have been accepted to study in other European countries such as Italy, Belgium, Ireland and France.
Alafranji’s mother Hayat Ghalayini lives in the English city of Manchester, having managed to flee Gaza in the early days of the war. She has not seen her daughter since she was 14.
Ghalayini said she feels “completely helpless” trying to get her daughter to the UK, with officials doing little to aid her plight.
“They say that because she does not have a visa she cannot come, but she cannot get those things without leaving Gaza,” she told The Guardian.
“In order for Dania to get a visa, she needed to submit some biometrics. But because of war there were no means for her to get those biometrics through,” she added.
“It’s a catch-22, we are just going in circles. A lot of people in the Home Office have children, and if they could just look at it from a strictly humanitarian perspective, they’d see a 16-year-old who is scared and in danger, and just wants to learn and be safe,” she said.
“If they could just give me a reason, then I would be happy with that, but she’s just a girl whose whole education has been halted.
“They did the same for the Ukrainian children. They did the same for children from other areas of war, children who had no connections to the UK. I just don’t understand, why can’t they help my daughter?”
