LONDON: A Palestinian teenager has said she is “stuck in hell” after being denied the chance to leave Gaza and join her mother in the UK.
Dania Alafranji, 16, was offered a place to study in England at Reddam House school 18 months ago but has yet to be given a UK visa. She has studied online in Gaza for two years and hopes to pursue a career in cybersecurity.
Alafranji was set to travel to the UK under the Nsouli Scholars Programme, but her family has since been “going in circles” trying to get her out of Gaza, where she cannot pursue her education because of the war.
“Everything was relatively normal, then suddenly we found ourselves stuck in hell,” she told The Guardian. “We can’t learn here, 90 percent of the schools and universities here have been destroyed, and the rest are used as shelters. The war is not my fault, and it’s not the fault of the other 600,000 Gazan students.”
She described Gaza as being “like an oven, and the fire is burning us not just from the outside but the inside as well.”
