Belgian minister under fire for denying evacuation to 13 Gazan scholarship students

A group of 13 students from Gaza with scholarship offers from Belgian universities held their breath as ministers seated 2000 miles away from their makeshift tents debated their fate on Wednesday (16 September) in Brussels, as the school year started without them. Despite their hard-earned student visas, the students are facing the prospect of having no support from the Belgian government about how to go about collecting them from the nearest embassies in Jerusalem or Jordan, while being unable to leave Gaza. “The minister is playing in postponing,” said Ahmed Abu Jami, a 28 year-old doctor from Gaza. “They want us to lose the scholarships and lose the academic year,” he told EUobserver. Abu Jami has a scholarship for a one-year master’s at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, and hopes to gain skills he can bring to Gaza’s destroyed health system. Although countries like Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom have negotiated diplomatic corridors of movement for students due to attend classes in their countries, Belgium’s immigration and asylum minister Anneleen Van Bossuyt has been unable to explain why this is something Brussels cannot provide. "If we make an exception for this group, why don’t we do the same for students or other groups from, for example, Sudan, Yemen, or Afghanistan?” the minister told EUobserver on Thursday (10 September). “Belgium has already done a lot for Gaza,” she told Belgium’s commission of the interior and migration. But choosing a nationality over another, she said, would be “inhumane.” “For these 13 yes but for those others…sorry, but we won’t do this.”