Advertise your job vacancies

Subscribe & Follow

From ruins to resilience: Gazan medical students triumph against adversity in SA

Twenty-seven final-year medical students from Al-Azhar University and Islamic University in Gaza were displaced from their universities after they were destroyed by Israeli missiles. But the students turned tragedy to triumph and have managed to complete their studies through the University of Cape Town and University of the Witswatersand.

16 May 2025

Source: Supplied. Twenty-seven students from Gaza bid farewell to South Africa on the steps at UCT. They left Gaza after their universities were destroyed during the war, and studied at UCT and Wits.

The students arrived in South Africa in 2024 to complete their medical studies in order to graduate. Most of the students managed to escape to Egypt through the Rafa border to get to South Africa. Their faculty deans had made arrangements with universities in South Africa to help the students complete their studies.

On 3 May 2025, Gift of the Givers, a non-profit organisation, bade farewell to the students at UCT after a dinner was held to celebrate their milestone after facing hardship and defying the odds by completing their studies despite being away from their families in Gaza for months.

Read the full story on Daily Maverick.

Source: Daily Maverick

Daily Maverick is a unique blend of news, information, analysis and opinion delivered from our newsrooms in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa. There are many ways to describe exactly what we do (and for the price of a cup of coffee we’re capable of talking your ears off about it), but the best way to understand the end result is to experience it. Every part of Daily Maverick is free-to-air and no payment is required, although free registration is required for a small subset of functions and pages.

Daily Maverick is run by an independently owned, private company with no affiliation to any other media group (or political party or religious organisation.) Follow Daily Maverick on Twitter at @dailymaverick.

Go to: https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/