ven after moving to Jakarta, Samaa Mwafaq carries a mark of war on her face: a small scar beneath her eyebrow, possibly left by a piece of shrapnel from an Israeli bombardment in 2023 on a hospital in the Gaza Strip where she was volunteering.
“I didn’t even notice it. Only later, after the bombings subsided, a fellow doctor told me that there was blood on my face. I thought it was from a patient I was tending to,” Samaa, 22, told The Jakarta Post by phone in March.
Samaa is one among a growing number of Palestinians residing in Indonesia, many of who fled Gaza after the Israeli military’s retaliatory strikes began in late October 2023, an action that a United Nations commission concluded in 2025 was a genocide.
Born and raised in Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza, she enrolled in 2024 as a medical student at YARSI University, a private Islamic university in Central Jakarta.
“We have around 70 Palestinian students across Indonesia, scattered across Jakarta, Maluku, Bandung, Makassar and cities in Sumatra,” said Samaa, citing data from the General Union of Palestinian Students in Indonesia (PMPI), where she chairs an academic committee.
For many of these students, continuing their education has become a way of preserving a sense of continuity while living in exile. Samaa is still enrolled as a pharmacy student at Al-Azhar University-Gaza, where she began her university career before it was disrupted due to Israeli attacks that laid waste to the territory’s education infrastructure.
“It’s quite hard to juggle both,” she said with a quiet laugh.
