Ireland willingly allowed me to study here — I'm asking for the same for other Gazan students
Displaced Palestinian children play inside a damaged building at the Islamic University in Gaza City in April. Unesco reported this year that 95% of Gaza's higher-education campuses had been damaged or destroyed. Photo: Saeed Jaras / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty
I escaped Gaza to study in Ireland. The students behind me are running out of time.
I am Sondos, one of 122 Palestinian students given the opportunity to come to Ireland in 2025.
Before the war, I had just completed my undergraduate degree in English language and literature at the University of Gaza. I hoped to study abroad and bring that knowledge back to Gaza, inspired by professors who had done the same.
Then the war began, and everything changed: my home, my work, my sense of safety, my sense of the future.
During the first weeks of the war, my family and I were trapped in our home as strikes fell around us. Glass shattered and debris fell. We gathered in one room, covering our heads and hoping to see daylight again, while saying the prayers people say when they believe they may be about to die.
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After that, I stopped thinking about the future. I thought only about surviving the day in front of me. When your life is reduced to finding food, water and safety, imagining tomorrow begins to feel like a luxury.
That experience was mine, but the feeling belongs to many of us. We were students, graduates, teachers, researchers and young professionals. War did not make us less ambitious or capable. It forced survival to come before everything else.
When I was accepted onto the Ireland Fellows Programme, something in me returned. For the first time in a long time, I could see something beyond survival.
One memory from my evacuation to Ireland has never left me. The day before I left Gaza, there was no flour in our home. My mother managed to buy one kilogram at a very high price so she could make something for my journey.
After leaving Gaza, I looked through the bus window in Amman and saw ordinary roadside stalls filled with food. I began to cry. Only hours earlier, my mother had struggled to find one kilogram of flour so her daughter would have something to eat while leaving a war zone.
Arriving in Ireland did not erase what we carried with us. But we continued. We studied. We completed our degrees. We worked. We volunteered. We began rebuilding our lives.
Ireland did not simply give us somewhere safe to be. Ireland gave us the possibility of imagining ourselves as people with futures again.
That is why, when I look at the students now waiting in Gaza for decisions on their appeals, I do not see visa files. I see us.
These students have survived extraordinary circumstances, secured university places, met academic and language requirements, and obtained full funding. They are waiting in circumstances where time cannot be treated as ordinary.
Most of Gaza's approximately 2.1 million people remain displaced. According to Gaza Ministry of Health figures cited by OCHA, 31 Palestinians were reported killed and 86 injured between August 26 and September 2 alone. One week.
The latest IPC analysis projects that more than 1.4 million people — 67% of Gaza's population — will face crisis-level or worse acute food insecurity between July and December 2026. When I read those figures, I think again of that kilogram of flour.
For someone in Gaza, waiting is not neutral. A student who is alive and able to answer an email today cannot be guaranteed those same circumstances tomorrow.
These students have found ways to continue their education while Gaza's education system has been devastated. UNESCO reported this year that 95% of Gaza's higher-education campuses had been damaged or destroyed.
But we have lost more than buildings and books. We have lost professors, teachers, researchers, writers and mentors.
For me, that loss is personal. One of the professors I lost was Dr Refaat Alareer, my teacher at the Islamic University of Gaza. In his poem If I Must Die, he wrote: “If I must die, you must live to tell my story.”
The students seeking higher education abroad today may become Gaza's next professors, teachers, researchers, writers, doctors, engineers and education leaders. If Gaza is ever to recover, we will need to rebuild not only homes and universities, but knowledge, teaching and intellectual life.
Many of us dreamed of studying abroad not simply to leave Gaza, but to learn and one day give something back. Please let these students live to tell ours.
A visa refusal can also affect opportunities beyond one academic year. If students later secure scholarships elsewhere, previous refusals may complicate future applications. For some, it may mean remaining trapped in Gaza with fewer ways forward.
We are not asking Ireland to disregard its immigration laws. We recognise that every appeal must be considered individually and according to Irish law.
We ask simply that the appeals of fully funded Gazan students be treated as urgent, prioritised and decided as quickly as possible on their individual merits.
Because what they do not have is time. The next evacuation is expected this week. And the killing in Gaza continues.
My Palestinian friends and fellow students here carry deep gratitude towards Ireland and those who welcomed us at the lowest point of our lives. It is precisely because we know what Ireland's support made possible for us that we are asking for that same opportunity to be protected for others.
Ireland cannot end everything these students are enduring in Gaza. But in these individual cases, Ireland has the ability to change what happens next. I know this because Ireland changed what happened next for me.
Sumud.
- Sondos Alfayoumi Gaza Student Community in Ireland
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