Three students from Gaza on their way to the Netherlands

As promised, the Dutch government is providing diplomatic assistance to Palestinian students and researchers who have been granted permission to come to the Netherlands. Three of them have now left Gaza by bus, NOS reports.

A group of forty to fifty Palestinian students and researchers have been given permission to study or work here: their documents were ready at the Dutch embassy in Jordan. However, they were unable to leave Gaza.

Two Palestinian students are now nevertheless on their way to the Netherlands, NOS writes. The third person is a journalist who had also been granted permission to come, but has since decided to go to Italy instead. According to reports, this was made possible through Dutch assistance.

That assistance was not initially guaranteed. At first, the government’s position was that they should solve their travel problems themselves.

The students and researchers lost a court case on the matter, but they appealed. The appeal proceedings could have taken so long that an interim ruling was issued: providing assistance would require little effort, the court argued, even if the government were ultimately found not to be legally obliged to do so.

At the end of May, a group of universities and the research institute NIAS sent a letter to the government to increase the pressure, but according to Minister of Foreign Affairs Tom Berendsen, this was unnecessary: he was already complying with the interim ruling.