Girl awarded scholarship at UK school trapped in Gaza

Dania Alfaranji should be well into her final year at a prestigious English boarding school.

- MAIRA BUTT

Like many teenage girls, she imagines what her dorm would look like and what clothes she might wear. The world should be full of possibilities. Instead, the 16-year-old is living in a tent in the backyard of a building in az-Zawayda in southern Gaza, a town reduced to rubble by airstrikes. She gathers firewood, waits desperately for aid trucks to deliver food, and hopes to make it out of the Gaza Strip alive. To make life worse, she has been separated from her mother, Hayat Ghalayini, who lives in the UK, and has been forced to grow up too quickly.

Dania was 14 when war broke out on 7 October 2023. As a top student, she was awarded a full scholarship to study at Reddam House, an independent boarding school in Berkshire, six months into the conflict. But she was unable to take up the place because of a gap in the British government's evacuation policy, which allows some university students to leave the Strip but excludes high-school students and postdoctoral students and researchers.

For Dania's mother, waiting for her daughter in Trafford, Manchester, time has stood still.

“I miss her. I can’t think of anything else,” Hayat tells The Independent. “Everything - cars, electricity, water, roads - reminds me of her. I go to sleep thinking about her, and I dream about just touching her.”

Hayat, a UK resident through her marriage to Dania’s stepfather in 2022, was separated from her daughter when war broke out. Amid the chaos, Dania's three older sisters, now in their twenties, made the difficult decision to ask their mother to evacuate, hoping they would be able to join her shortly.