British celebrities have pooled together memorabilia from their football and acting careers for an online auction that will fund scholarships for Palestinian students in Gaza who want to study in the UK.
The UK government has said it will help students to travel from Gaza to Britain if they have fully funded scholarships. The charity Phoenix Space's celebrity auction opens on July 27 on the Jumblebee platform. Its organisers say hundreds of students in Gaza have earned places at leading UK universities but do not have the funding needed.
Sports presenter and former England footballer Gary Lineker has donated a signed T-shirt from his days playing in Japan with Nagoya Grampus Eight, while actress Maxine Peake has donated a production hoodie from the film I Swear and the hat she wore playing Hamlet.
Actress Juliet Stevenson has parted with the first poetry book she owned, and singer Charlotte Church has offered a space at her wellness retreat. They are part of a growing group of people in the public eye who are using their profiles to campaign about the Palestinian issue in the UK.
Paapa Essiedu, who plays Severus Snape in the upcoming Harry Potter TV series, has donated his copy of the Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. “I can’t imagine almost all universities being destroyed and the immense talent in every discipline wasted: no opportunities and no choice at all,” he said.
Growing scholarship opportunities
Around 100 students from Gaza were able to come to the UK to study in the 2025-26 academic year. Many had secured their places before the war broke out but had to defer entry until the UK could ensure their evacuation from the strip.
Mahmoud Hasanain, 20, is studying computer science at the University of Glasgow, having secured a place and a scholarship while living in a tent in Gaza. He hopes his brother Mohammed can join him for his postgraduate studies.
Mahmoud finished secondary school in summer 2023, only months before the Israel-Gaza war broke out. Despite the Israeli blockade on Gaza, he said life was “easy, normal” with clear opportunities ahead for him. He enjoyed online gaming and would tweak his PC to disable malware services to gain access and compete internationally.
“We had everything in front of us. Then everything changed,” he said. “We had no electricity, no water, not even a stable Wi-Fi connection.”
The family's home was destroyed and his mother and five siblings found themselves living shelters without water or electricity. “On a daily basis I was carrying 20kg of water on each arm, and walking for distances, just to provide the required amount of water for the family to survive,” he said.
Over the next two years, as living conditions continued to worsen, he applied for university degrees and scholarships, hoping this could be a ticket out of Gaza and for a chance to pursue his dreams.
“Rather than sit and blame the circumstances, I instead started looking for a solution,” Mahmoud said.
He bought an eSIM card and would take it to the top of the highest cliff near his city of Deir Al Balah, raising the phone so he could catch a signal. Using the hotspot, he then filled in application forms.
This put him at risk of being targeted by Israeli forces occupying Gaza. In the evenings, he wrote his personal statements by candlelight.
Mahmoud arrived in Glasgow a month before the end of his first term due to delays getting out of Gaza. He struggled at first to adjust to a city in peacetime and had to work hard to catch up on missed work. “I was like a newborn baby seeing the world for the first time,” he said.
He said he lost 25kg in Gaza during the war but appears fitter and stronger after less than a year in the UK.
Now, he wants to help his brother Mohammed. “He can't be evacuated without the funding. I want to be reunited with him in the same city, and in order for him to take his place, we just need a scholarship,” Mahmoud said.
Mohammed cannot leave the strip due to strict Israeli controls over who can enter or leave, and the evacuation permits are costly. “Unfortunately, my days aren’t spent in a lecture hall as [they are] supposed to. Instead, they are spent worrying about surviving and if we will make it to the next day,” he said.
Many Palestinians come to the UK on the Foreign Office's Chevening Scholarships, where the costs are usually shared with other grant-giving foundations. The Bseisu Foundation is one such organisation, while the Durham Palestine Educational Trust offers scholarships to Palestinian students who have secured places at the city's university.
Goldsmiths, University of London launched a Palestinian scholarship in 2024 following a campaign by students and has taken in its first cohort.
Students hoping for evacuation this year have offers from University College London, Imperial and Edinburgh in subjects including artificial intelligence and cognitive neuroscience.
Growing food insecurity
The UK has spoken out against food insecurity in Gaza, while the latest report by the UN’s food security monitor (IPC) says “crisis levels of food insecurity” in Gaza persist and are projected to worsen.
“It is completely unacceptable that 1.2 million people are facing significant food shortages, with 90 per cent of the population confined to around 30 per cent of the Gaza Strip. Averting famine cannot be the benchmark for success,” a Foreign Office spokesperson said.
“Israeli restrictions on aid and repeated displacement are driving disease, water scarcity, and decimating health services,” they said.
“Humanitarian aid must never be used as a political tool. The UK will continue to support humanitarian organisations working on the ground and press Israel to enable aid and commercial goods to enter Gaza at the scale needed.”
The war on Gaza has destroyed or damaged 95 per cent of higher education campuses examined in a UN-backed assessment. The situation remains deadly, with Israeli forces having killed more than 1,000 people since a ceasefire began in October.
Jewellery at auction
Two items of jewellery will be auctioned at Bonham’s at a later date. Oscar winner Dame Janet Suzman is donating a gold, star-shaped vintage Christian Lacroix couture brooch.
An antique pearl necklace worn by Dame Vanessa Redgrave during her Tony Award-winning run in the 2003 Broadway revival of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night will also be auctioned with a letter from the actress.
“There is nothing more beautiful than the ability to learn, study and have education – to then pass on,” Ms Redgrave wrote about her donation. The necklace, which she received as a gift from her mother for her 50th birthday, symbolises “passing on the beauty of knowledge”.
