Follow your dream... if you leave your children behind'

The offer of a scholarship in the UK left Amany with an ‘impossible choice’ after a Foreign Office ultimatum. The news will break her children’s hearts, she tells Maira Butt

- MAIRA BUTT

A Palestinian mother has been forced to give up on a prestigious scholarship to study at a British university after an “unfair” government policy prevented her from bringing her family to the UK.

Amany, 34, won a life-changing Phoenix Space scholarship to study for an MSc in gender and international relations at the University of Bristol earlier this year.

Last month, she told The Independent she was one of several students waiting for an evacuation from Gaza to take up their place at a UK university. Leaders at several of Britain’s top universities had warned Sir Keir Starmer that frustrating delays to evacuations meant that many students were at risk of losing their place.

Now, she has been called up for evacuation out of Gaza on Wednesday, but has been told she must leave her children and husband behind.

Amany has three children: a 10-year-old daughter, Taima, and two boys, six-year-old Taim and three-year-old Adam. She says she has been left with an impossible choice.

“Every detail of my children’s happiness matters to me, their comfort, their strength, their ability to feel love within the family,” she told The Independent. “How can I leave them?”

As a determined and “devoted” mother, she says she spent considerable resources putting her children through private education before the war. They were enrolled in every extracurricular class she could find, and she tried to provide them with a semblance of normality even as the horror of the war in Gaza unfolded.