Real Lives

Fifty-one Gaza dentistry students finish their degrees in Lahore

Times of Palestine3h ago

Published Monday, August 10, 2026 · 12:20 Jerusalem time

Graphic: Times of Palestine

Original Reporting

By TOP Newsdesk · 2 min read

The hall at the University of Lahore's College of Medicine and Dentistry filled on 23 July with a graduating class that should have crossed a stage in Gaza City. Fifty-one Palestinians took Bachelor of Dental Surgery degrees, the Saudi daily Arab News reported, nearly three years after Israel's war closed the faculty at al-Azhar University where they had begun.

They arrived in Pakistan in October 2024, in the second winter of the war, under an initiative called G-HOPE, run by the Pakistani charity Alkhidmat Foundation with the Global Relief Trust and Doctors of Rahman. The scholarships cover everything, and the students finished their remaining subjects and their clinical rotations in Lahore's teaching hospitals.

Mustafa Abushaban is 25 and intends to go back to Gaza and practise there. "I consider it my second home now," he said of Pakistan. "I will stay in contact with the people here."

Ala Ayad, also 25, completed her final year and her clinical internship, and gave the credit for the whole of it to her mother, who kept her studying through everything the last three years contained.

"I consider it home as well, with the same value as Palestine in my heart."

Nermeen Manna, 25, who is staying in Pakistan for postgraduate study

What the class carries back#

The number matters beyond the ceremony. Gaza's dental faculties were among the many parts of its higher-education system that Israeli strikes and the closure of the crossings put out of operation, and the graduates are trained clinicians the Strip does not currently produce.

Alkhidmat's secretary-general, Syed Waqas Jafri, said the foundation is now supporting 288 Palestinian medical students in Pakistan, mostly in Lahore with a group in Islamabad, and that the aim is a thousand. Another 110 students have completed house jobs in Egypt.

Pakistani outlets covering the foundation's own announcement on 28 July counted 38 of the new dental graduates as Alkhidmat scholarship holders, a subset of the university's larger cohort.

The Pakistani foreign ministry set out the framework for the wider scheme when it launched, describing a fully funded pathway for a first group of 192 Palestinian medical students to finish their training in Pakistani universities.

The stage they did not get#

Every one of these graduates left classmates behind. Al-Azhar University in Gaza, founded in 1991, has held its own ceremonies among damaged buildings, and Gaza's medical students have graduated in the ruins of al-Shifa Hospital.

What the Lahore class has is a completed degree, a licence pathway and, for those who intend to return, the specific skill a population of two million with almost no functioning dental care will need for a generation.

Abushaban plans to be one of them. Manna is staying to specialise, and says she will bring the specialty home. Both answers are the same answer, arriving on different timetables.