Since December 2024, Fadel Afana has been living an unusual routine. Each morning, the 53-year-old Palestinian psychiatrist commutes for two hours using public transport in the Paris region before donning a white coat at Sainte-Anne Hospital, in the French capital's 14th arrondissement, and listening to patients. This calm daily life contrasts with the "chaos, terror and war that [his] people are enduring," summarized the native of Rafah, a city at the extreme south of the Gaza Strip near the Egyptian border. Several of his relatives, who remained there, have died since he arrived in France in October.
This professional opportunity, which he says he is "extremely grateful to benefit from, with [his] wife and [his] two daughters," was made possible by the national program for the emergency reception of scientists and artists in exile (PAUSE), created within the Collège de France in 2017, with financial and logistical support from the Paris Neuroscience Foundation (FNP). On April 25, "16 other beneficiaries from Gaza and their families, who had been blocked for a year by the closure of the border between Egypt and Gaza, landed in France," said Laura Lohéac, director of the program. As the defense of science is at the center of global geopolitical news, "the nationalities of exiled candidates reflect the map of conflicts and manifestations of authoritarian regimes," she described. "After Syria, Turkey, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, our program gradually opened to sub-Saharan Africa, South America, before receiving people from Afghanistan, Ukraine, Russia and then Palestine starting in 2021."
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