GAZA CITY — As the academic year gears up around the world, hundreds of college and graduate students here are growing increasingly desperate. Israel's decision to virtually seal off the Gaza Strip after the militant group Hamas took control last summer has made the students partners in frustrated ambitions and pawns in a larger political struggle.
The case of seven Gazan Fulbright scholars who were not being allowed to leave the enclave attracted a flurry of international media attention; four of them got out in June after the U.S. intervened. But very few Gazans are allowed out anymore, except in extreme medical cases.
"I think I'm going to lose [my scholarship] and then I'm going to check right into the asylum," said Wael Hamdi al Daya, who was accepted to the doctoral program in international finance at the University of Bradford in Britain. "It's a long struggle just to obtain a scholarship. So to do all that and gain it, and then lose it. . . ."
Individual students -- 58 so far this summer, according to Israel -- have been permitted to leave to study overseas. But Daya, the coordinator of Gaza's trapped student committee, estimates that at least 600 have been accepted to foreign universities. That number, he said, is probably low and doesn't take into account a new dynamic: students with ambitions to study abroad who didn't bother to apply.
The plight of Gaza's students drew unusually direct comments from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in May.
"If you cannot engage young people and give them a complete horizon to their expectations and to their dreams, then I don't know that there would be any future for Palestine," she said.
After Rice's comments, Israeli policy shifted slightly. A June 7 letter from Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to a lawmaker states that "a few exceptions were approved" after the request of "international actors."
According to the letter, an excerpt of which was provided to The Times, Israel would begin "responding positively to requests from friendly countries."
But for the students stuck in Gaza, talk is cheap and time is running out.
"It's not yet too late, but it's getting close," said Sari Bashi, executive director of the Gisha Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, a private Israeli group that has lobbied on behalf of several Palestinian students and against the closure policy. "The problem is urgent right now and the response offered is woefully inadequate."
