Gaza Students Won Full Scholarships but Cannot Leave

This semester, lecture halls across Germany are filling up for the winter term, and Gaza students who earned some of Europe's most competitive scholarships will not be in them. One twenty-three-year-old from Gaza City studied German for years, won a foundation grant worth more than a thousand euros a month, and was admitted to a business master's program in western Germany. She cannot reach the country. The German embassy office that handles Gaza visa applications requires applicants to appear in person in Cairo, and the crossings out of the Strip have been closed to regular passenger travel since May 2024.

Her case, documented by investigators, is not unusual. As reported by Drop Site News, the student appealed directly to German lawmakers, received a formal rejection letter from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in July, and paid her semester fees anyway, still hoping for a way out. In a note seen by the outlet, the foundation wrote that applications could only be submitted in person at the visa office in Cairo responsible for Gaza, and that the Foreign Office could not back her departure. She told the outlet she had received the scholarship and the admission, paid her semester fees, arranged her health insurance, and kept improving her German — and that, after coming that far, it was crushing to accept she still could not physically reach Germany. The grant stays valid for one year, and the clock is ticking.

Scholarships Gaza Students Cannot Use

The paperwork problem runs deeper than one embassy. Gaza has no German visa mission, and the uni-assist agency that processed her application advised her to apply for a visa at an embassy "in your country" — a circular instruction for someone trapped in a territory with no exit. Other Gaza students face the same wall. The outlet found several more Gaza students who hold German scholarships or university admissions yet cannot physically take up their places, because every departure from Gaza now requires authorization from Israeli authorities, and the regular crossings have not reopened.

What makes the barrier so bitter is how little is left to study at home. According to The Destination, Gaza's education system has been devastated by the war that began in October 2023. UNESCO figures cited in the Drop Site investigation put the damage at twenty-two of Gaza's thirty-eight university campuses completely destroyed, with fourteen more damaged. For Gaza students who dreamed of careers in engineering, medicine, or teaching, a foreign scholarship has stopped being a nice-to-have and become one of the few remaining paths to a classroom — a path that currently ends at a locked border.

How Europe Treats Gaza Students Differently

Other European countries have shown the blockage is a policy choice, not an impossibility. Italy has evacuated more than two hundred students through a state-run university corridor since September 2025, and Ireland brought in around seventy starting in August 2025, according to the Drop Site reporting. But the trend is moving the wrong way: Ireland approved only thirty-nine of the one hundred and forty-two study visa applications from Palestinians it ruled on this year — roughly one in four, down from nearly eighty-four percent in 2025 — and the United States suspended visa issuance to people traveling on Palestinian Authority documents in January.

Belgium's universities tried to fight the same tide and lost. In September, the country's ten leading university rectors signed a joint letter expressing "dismay" after the Belgian government abandoned plans to evacuate thirteen Gaza students, as reported by The Destination. The rectors accused the government of turning the students into bargaining chips in a coalition dispute over migration policy, arguing the young people had earned their places on merit and planned to return home to help rebuild. The government walked away anyway, and activists called it a lack of political will rather than a logistical impossibility.

Germany's own record looks narrow by comparison. The federal government says around six hundred and thirty German nationals and family members have left Gaza since October 2023, and the Drop Site investigation notes Germany accepted just one medical evacuee from the Strip by late 2025, against more than two hundred in Italy. In autumn 2025, Berlin rejected an offer from the city of Hanover to take in up to twenty sick and injured children for treatment — a decision that drew sharp criticism when it emerged that eight donkeys had been evacuated from Gaza to Germany for veterinary care.

A Generation Losing Schooling

The trapped Gaza students sit inside a much larger crisis facing Gaza students across the region. According to UN News, a new UNHCR report released in early October warns that funding cuts are threatening education for millions of young refugees. Of the estimated thirteen point one million refugee children of school age worldwide in 2025, nearly half — five point eight million — remain out of school. Only thirty-two percent of refugee children were enrolled in secondary school in 2025, against sixty-five percent at primary level, and two in three arrive at primary school without the foundational learning to keep up.

Higher education shows what sustained investment can achieve: refugee university enrollment hit a record eleven percent in 2025, with more than four hundred and fifty thousand young people studying, according to the UN refugee agency's report. But the agency's chief warned that education cuts risk reversing decades of progress, calling the funding squeeze a threat to a whole generation's future. UN High Commissioner for Refugees Barham Salih put the stakes plainly: "Education gives young people the tools to shape their own future," and said the international community must keep that door open.

That is exactly what is happening in reverse for the Gazan scholarship holders. They are not asking to skip the line — they won admissions, passed language exams, and secured funding. One young woman in Egypt who fled the war in Sudan, quoted in the UN report, said school gave her confidence that even after losing her home to the war, her dreams were still intact. For the Gaza students still inside the Strip, the dream now depends on embassies choosing to process a visa on paper instead of in person, and on crossings that have no announced date for reopening. As the semester moves on without them, their scholarships edge closer to expiring — and the classrooms they earned keep filling up with other people's names.

The picture on the ground is covered in depth on the War topic page, including the longer context on how the ceasefire's temporary divisions have hardened — read the coverage of a year into the Gaza ceasefire.