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, Cyprus’ representative to Palestine told the Cyprus Mail on Friday.

“Her great-grandmother was born in Cyprus,” said Marios Stavrou, head of the Republic’s representative office in Ramallah.

Stavrou explained that the woman’s great-grandmother did not pass on Turkish Cypriot citizenship to her son, meaning it was not transmitted to subsequent generations. As a result, the woman does not hold Cypriot citizenship.

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.

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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.

Stavrou, however, said the representative office had been in contact with the woman.

The foreign ministry also confirmed on Thursday that she was “not a Cypriot national in any case.”