Ramallah, Palestine. Cyprus’ representative to Palestine said a 24-year-old woman who appealed to Cyprus for help to leave Gaza is not a Cypriot citizen, despite being of Cypriot descent through her great-grandmother. The foreign ministry also said she was “not a Cypriot national in any case.”
Citizenship status clarified
Marios Stavrou, head of the Republic’s representative office in Ramallah, told the Cyprus Mail on Friday that the woman’s great-grandmother was born in Cyprus.
He said the great-grandmother did not pass on Turkish Cypriot citizenship to her son, and that it was therefore not transmitted to later generations. As a result, he said, the woman does not hold Cypriot citizenship.
Appeal for evacuation
Earlier this week, the woman appealed to the government to evacuate her and her family from Gaza, saying they had been trapped in the war zone for more than three years.
In a video shared by Turkish Cypriot newspaper Ozgur Gazete, she said repeated attempts to contact the Republic of Cyprus’ representative office in Ramallah had been unsuccessful.
“Twenty months of calls and emails to the Cypriot embassy and still my case has not been resolved,” she said.
Official response
Stavrou said the representative office had been in contact with the woman.
The foreign ministry confirmed on Thursday that she was “not a Cypriot national in any case.”
