\n<\/p>\n
W<\/span>ithin days of 7 October 2023, much of Maryam\u2019s world had been wiped out: her home in Gaza City, her children\u2019s schools, and the Islamic University of Gaza, where she was a graduate student in physics, were all destroyed by airstrikes. In early December, Maryam\u2019s mentor \u2013 Sufian Tayeh, a prominent Palestinian scientist and president of the Islamic University of Gaza \u2013 was killed along with his family in an Israeli strike.<\/p>\n The professor has been a \u201cfather figure\u201d to her, Maryam told the Guardian. When she learned of his death, she remembers closing the physics notebooks she had grabbed as she fled her home and thinking her studies would be over. \u201cMy entire world had collapsed,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n But as she repeatedly fled Israel\u2019s bombs, Maryam sought ways to keep not only her family alive, but also her dream of becoming a physicist. While living in a tent in Rafah, with no stable access to internet or electricity, she learned of a spot near the border where she could get a faint internet signal from Egypt. Despite the risks, she started going there to research opportunities abroad, eventually managing to earn admission to a fully funded PhD program at the University of Maryland. After deferring her start date by a year, she was meant to start this month.<\/p>\n But Maryam remains in Gaza. She is one of dozens of students from the devastated territory who have been admitted to US universities and colleges but are stuck, advocates say, after the Trump administration suspended nearly all non-immigrant visas for Palestinian passport holders.<\/p>\n As part of its campaign against US universities, the administration has made it more difficult for international students to travel to the US, and claims it has revoked the visas of thousands of foreign students already in the US over unspecified violations.<\/p>\n But for Palestinians in Gaza, the policy change is uniquely devastating.<\/p>\n \u201cI will never forget the moment I received the message confirming my acceptance into a fully funded PhD program. I rushed back to our tent to hold my children tightly and tell them the good news \u2013 that we would survive this nightmare,\u201d said Maryam, who is using a pseudonym to protect her and her family. \u201cEverything came crashing down again when I heard about the suspension of visa processing. It felt like my dreams had been destroyed once more.\u201d<\/p>\n Leila, a 22-year-old from Gaza City, was four years into a five-year engineering program when the war started. She would walk up to two hours a day to find wifi, relying on solar power to charge her phone, and managed to apply and be admitted to a university in the north-western US as a transfer student. (Leila is also a pseudonym, and she asked that the Guardian not publish the name of the university.)<\/p>\n Then came the news that all visas were suspended. \u201cWe are just stuck in Gaza right now,\u201d she told the Guardian in a series of voice memos.<\/p>\n A spokesperson for the state department said in a statement that the department had suspended the processing of nonimmigrant visas for Palestinian Authority passport holders \u201cwhile we conduct a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to vet individuals from Gaza\u201d and that it will \u201ctake the time necessary to conduct a full and thorough review\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery visa decision is a national security decision,\u201d the spokesperson added.<\/p>\n According to a cable viewed by the Associated Press, department officials said the new restrictions were intended \u201cto ensure that such applications have undergone necessary, vetting, and screening protocols to ensure the applicants\u2019 identity and eligibility for a visa under US law\u201d. The suspension doesn\u2019t apply to Palestinians who hold passports from other countries \u2013 unless they are found to have ties to the Palestinian Authority, or the Palestine Liberation Organization.<\/p>\n The Student Justice Network, a US-based collective formed after Donald Trump signed orders in January targeting international students, has been supporting students from Gaza who are seeking to continue their interrupted studies abroad. But of the dozens of students the group says it has helped with university and visa applications, only a handful have made it to the US. (They declined to provide more specific numbers.)<\/p>\n Securing a visa to travel to the US from Gaza was an arduous process even in quieter times. Before the war, Palestinians in Gaza had to secure appointments at US embassies outside the territory \u2013 usually Egypt or Israel. Obtaining a permit to travel to Israel has been impossible since the war began, while the border with Egypt has remained largely closed.<\/p>\n International students have been targeted with a series of federal actions aimed both at Palestinian students specifically and the broader community of more than one million foreign nationals studying in the country.<\/p>\n The state department has enlisted consulates overseas into the effort. Earlier this year, it paused all student visa appointments. They have resumed, but prospective students are now being subjected to additional vetting for, among other things, \u201canti-American\u201d views.<\/p>\n But for Palestinians the restrictions are blanket. \u201cEvery single one of them has been impacted by this,\u201d Majid said of the students her group has been helping who were meant to start their studies this fall. \u201cThere\u2019s no clear understanding as to when their applications will be processed, and this affects their ability to attend their universities on time \u2013 and in some cases it could actually impact whether or not they\u2019re able to maintain their scholarships.\u201d<\/p>\n Thomas Cohen, a physics professor at the University of Maryland, told the Guardian that Maryam was one of two physics students from Gaza admitted to the university last year. But getting them out of Gaza proved so difficult that the university ended up deferring the students\u2019 admissions by a year as they tried to get visa appointments.<\/p>\n Maryam was able to book an interview at the US embassy in Egypt, and Cohen offered to personally pay for her way there \u2013 but the border was shut down when Israeli forces took control of it in May 2024. She was still looking for a way out when the US announced the suspension of visas for Palestinians.<\/p>\n Cohen said he tried all he could to help Maryam and the other student \u2013 because their academic records earned them a spot at the university but also because he understood that the opportunity could save their lives. He spoke of the Holocaust survivors in his own family, and those who \u201cdidn\u2019t survive because they had no way to leave\u201d Nazi-occupied Poland.<\/p>\n Cohen is now advising the students to pursue opportunities in Europe or Canada. Even if they were to get a visa to the US, \u201cthe political climate we\u2019re in, it\u2019s dangerous for Palestinians\u201d, he says.<\/p>\n Majid, of the Student Justice Network, said the group had also been encouraging the students they support to pursue options in other countries. But even if they gain admission elsewhere, the border with Egypt remains sealed shut as Israel has intensified its military campaign.<\/p>\n \u201cThese are students who have gone through two plus years without an educational infrastructure,\u201d Majid said, noting that all of Gaza\u2019s universities have been destroyed.<\/p>\n \u201cThink about having applied to university when you were 17 or 18, and then think about applying under bombardments, and starvation, and with limited resources, and having your documents destroyed, and having lost your family members,\u201d she added. \u201cTo yank these fully funded opportunities away from them is devastating.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Within days of 7 October 2023, much of Maryam\u2019s world had been wiped out: her home in Gaza City, her children\u2019s schools, and the Islamic University of Gaza, where she was a graduate student in physics, were all destroyed by airstrikes. In early December, Maryam\u2019s mentor \u2013 Sufian Tayeh, a prominent Palestinian scientist and president<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22461,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[9643,1233,13769,11679,809,489],"class_list":{"0":"post-22460","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-accepted","9":"tag-gaza","10":"tag-managed","11":"tag-stuck","12":"tag-theyre","13":"tag-universities"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22460\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Looking elsewhere<\/strong><\/h2>\n