Dozens of people from Gaza seeking visas to study in Ireland are denied entry

Before the war started, Haneen Eshraim, an English teacher in Gaza, was hustling as hard as she could, she said, recently.

“I worked in a school during the day while also running my own private English teaching centre,” Eshraim said.

She wanted to make her own money and be independent, she said. Eshraim was born and raised in Gaza. “I have lived here my entire life.”

She did her undergrad in English language education at Gaza’s public university, Al-Azhar, she said. And she was dreaming about doing her master’s in an English-speaking country, she said.

In October 2023, after Hamas members killed over 1,200 Israelis and took some 250 people hostage, the Israeli government launched what became a relentless mass slaughter campaign, taking the lives of about 70,000 people – though that’s probably a conservative estimate.

“I lost almost everything,” said Eshraim. “I lost my home, my teaching business, my source of income, many of my personal belongings, and people I cared about.”

Now that that bombing has abated, people in Gaza are still navigating their own daily struggles. Even charging a phone involves a dangerous journey now, said Eshraim. “We have no regular electricity at all.”

Despite all of this, Eshraim swung into action. On a patchy internet connection that regularly cut out, she said, she spent months applying to different universities.

She’d a bunch of offers, she said, but decided to go with a scholarship from University College Dublin (UCD) to study a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) course. 

She is among a small number of young people in Gaza who have sought a reprieve from war and tried to restore in their lives something that resembles normality by applying for student visas through some universities’ humanitarian scholarship schemes.

A visa is the thing that lets you get through border control and into the country, but you need to register it at the city’s immigration office and get an immigration stamp to live here.

Travelling without a visa is expensive and dangerous, even more so for Palestinians who live under Israeli siege. Meanwhile Israeli citizens don't need a visa to come here.

Between 2024 to 30 June 2026, 305 Palestinian citizens applied for long-stay – that’s for people who want to stay in Ireland for more than three months – student visas, according to Department of Justice figures. 

Of that 305 applications, 58 of them were rejected – roughly 19 percent. Eshraim, who got a rejection letter just last week, isn’t counted in that statistic yet, but she wasn’t alone in getting a refusal.

In an email to those would-be students last week, a UCD worker wrote that “multiple students” had their visa applications thrown out. 

For others from Gaza, who have their student visa application approved, the reality of how shaky the immigration stamp is – that the system doesn’t automatically recognise their vulnerability – quickly sets in, they say.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said “there are no special arrangements for Palestinian nationals in place, nor are there any plans to introduce any”. 

The years of living precariously 

Ibrahim Abusaqer, another student from Gaza, is some ways along the path that Eshraim had hoped to take.

He did his master’s in public health at UCD, he said, recently, sitting at a city centre café. But the question for him is what comes next. 

In another life, in Gaza he was a dentist, he said, but translating his qualifications involves moving through a maze of bureaucracy. 

He was wearing a black beaded wristband on top of another one with the pattern of the Palestinian keffiyeh. 

The closer they got to the end of term time, said Abusaqer, he and others felt the clock ticking down on their student immigration Stamp 2s. 

People in Abusaqer's position can move on to graduate immigration permission 1G – and time on it does count towards citizenship – for two years. And on that, try to find an employer who’s willing to sponsor a work permit. 

But it’s not easy, and sometimes dependent on chance and knowing someone who knows someone. 

In recent years, non-EU graduates who’d asked for some extra time on their 1G stamps to find work have said they grappled with poverty and unemployment as they lost their legal status for long stretches because the Department of Justice has been slow to review their cases.

Abusaqer said that UCD staff went out of their way to help get people to safety out of Gaza. “They did impossible things even outside of their work,” he said.

But people in his group scrambled to find a solution to steady their status and living situation once the term ended and they had to move out of student accommodations, he said. 

They wrestled with questions like should they get their 1G, hustle hard and hope for the best, or apply for asylum and join its system of accommodation.  

“I don’t want to mention other schemes, but for example, for Ukraine, I know we’re not an EU country, but we deserve something similar,” he said. 

The EU's Temporary Protection Directive unlocks the zone for those fleeing Russia's war on Ukraine, which means they can travel to Europe without visas and automatically get recognised as refugees without navigating the asylum bureacracy.

They can work, set up their own business and access some housing aid, though the latter has been dwindling in recent years.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said its student immigration stamp is for the most part for studying, though people are allowed casual part-term employment during the term and free to work full-time once it wraps up.

Those who move on to its graduate stamp can continue to work full-time for as long as it’s valid, they said.

Meanwhile, former students from Gaza who do apply for asylum see that the wait is not short-lived even when it’s broadly agreed they are in need of protection.

Anne Connolly, a member of D6 for All, who hosts a student from Gaza in her home, said that when he first got here he was still too shaken to focus in class.

So, he deferred the course for a year. But he has since applied for asylum and has been waiting months for an answer. 

“But he got his work permit, so he can work,” said Connolly. 

Ireland does offer a refugee-protection programme that’s different from its regular asylum system. Those who arrive as “programme refugees” don’t have to navigate the asylum bureaucracy. 

But Ireland’s admission intake through the scheme has been falling in recent years. 

Last December,Fianna Fáil’s Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan TD told the Dáil that “in accordance with the terms of the scheme the number of admissions available under the 2025 Programme was limited to 50”. 

He said application numbers were far beyond that so the state had to turn some people away which was naturally disappointing to those applicants, and a partner organisation held online sessions for them to soften the blow. 

He’s committed to welcoming 50 more programme refugees during 2026 and 2027, O’Callaghan said. 

The scheme prioritises evacuation of at-risk groups like reporters, LGBTQ people, and those who press for women’s rights, he said.  

Offering temporary protection status to citizens of countries experiencing conflict and volatility is not uncommon. 

The EU offers temporary protection to Ukrainians. Before Trump assumed office again in the United States, its government used to grant temporary protection to people from Syria and Haiti. 

"People with dreams and ambitions"

Eshraim, the woman in Gaza whose visa application to come study in Ireland was rejected, said the refusal letter cited a volley of arguments.

Things like her financial stability, gaps in her education and employment history, her past qualifications, “evidence of my English language ability”, her academic capability to undertake the master’s course at UCD, she said.

Also, “whether my primary purpose for travelling to Ireland was genuinely to study”. 

Eshraim would have tried to do her master’s in a Western English-speaking country even if the war hadn’t thrown her off course, she said.

The visa application was her refusal to let the war sum her up and unravel her life’s plans, she said. 

It was her only “realistic opportunity at this stage to leave Gaza safely and continue my education”, she said.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said its officials work closely with staff at the Irish embassy in Tel Aviv to process visa applications submitted by Palestinian citizens as fast as possible. 

In reviewing them, officials aim to pin down whether someone has a “legitimate reason to come to Ireland prior to travel”, they said. 

Zoë Lawlor, chairperson of Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC), said that it’s "appalling" that some people in Gaza who show so much resilience by applying to come here to study are turned away.

This is while the Irish government “rightly acknowledges that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people”, she said.

The students who came have been a positive addition to the academic community, said Lawlor, and it was lovely to see them meeting with President Catherine Connolly recently. 

The batch of recent visa refusals is another “example of a government that sometimes says the right things on Palestine but repeatedly fails to act”, she said. 

Eshraim, the woman in Gaza, said she isn’t asking for special treatment, just a fair shot to stay on track in life. 

“I hope people in Ireland understand that students from Gaza are not only defined by the difficult circumstances we are living through,” she said.

“We are students, teachers, professionals, and people with dreams and ambitions.”