The UK Is Failing Palestinians At Home and Abroad - tribunemag.co.uk

There’s no official figure for the number of Palestinians who have arrived in Britain from Gaza since October 2023, but community data estimates the number to be around 2,000 people. In this time, Palestinians have entered the country through student visas, refugee family reunion (before its suspension), medical evacuation, and irregular routes, rather than through a dedicated scheme to quickly get Palestinians to safety.

The Ukraine Family Scheme, on the other hand, was introduced less than ten days after Russia’s invasion in 2022 to allow Ukrainians to flee violence and join their family members in Britain. The scheme recognised that ordinary immigration procedures were inadequate and provided a route designed around the realities of war. By the time it closed in February 2024, the government had granted nearly 75,000 visas for family reunion, in addition to over 200,000 visas through the Homes for Ukraine Sponsorship Scheme.

Three years into the genocide in Gaza, there’s still no specific family route allowing Palestinians in Britain to temporarily bring their relatives in Gaza to safety. Such a scheme would only make around 5,000 Palestinians eligible for reunification, a figure that pales in comparison to the number of people who came to the UK through tailored routes from Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong.

Palestinian families are instead expected to navigate immigration routes designed for entirely different circumstances. The situation became even more difficult after then Home Secretary Yvette Cooper suspended the refugee family reunion route in September 2025, removing one of the few available paths for the reunification of refugees in Britain with their spouses and children abroad.

This decision has had a direct impact on Palestinian families, including for those who had already applied. In July, The Guardian reported that the Home Office has been blocking dozens of women and children in Gaza from reuniting with an immediate family member who has refugee status in the UK. Even though they had applied before route’s suspension, the Home Office has used legal challenges to actively prevent their evacuation and has even claimed that their small children pose a security risk to Britain. In response, a Home Office spokesperson simply said, ‘Under our reforms to create a fairer asylum system, family reunion will no longer be automatic. Those seeking to bring family members to the UK will need to meet stricter criteria’. Home Secretary Mahmood has not provided further explanation.

Yesterday, however, Mahmood announced that the Home Office will reopen the UK Resettlement Scheme, a different route that operates in partnership with the UN Refugee Agency, with twenty five per cent of arrivals to be Afghan women and girls and Palestinians. While this is a welcome development, the total number of people to arrive under the scheme will initially be in the hundreds and may only rise to thousands at some point in the future. Palestinians will make up less than a quarter of these refugees. This is not an adequate response to the demands of Palestinians in the UK who desperately want to bring their families to safety.

But even when Palestinians in Gaza are eligible for travel to the UK, they can face an impossible bureaucratic barrier: biometrics. The UK Visa Application Centre in Gaza has been closed since October 2023 due to Israel’s bombardment. Applicants are therefore expected to travel elsewhere to provide their fingerprints and photo, but Palestinians living under siege can’t simply travel to another country to complete their visa application. Rather than finding an alternative, the government has left them in Gaza, struggling to survive.

Of course, there is already a mechanism within the immigration system for dealing with exceptional circumstances, one which makes it possible to excuse an applicant from providing biometrics before travelling to the UK. Under the Ukraine scheme, for example, biometrics were taken upon arrival in the UK. This is also the arrangement for the small number of people who managed to leave Gaza through the UK’s medical evacuation and scholarship arrangements. In these cases, the Home Office conducts security checks using biographical information before departure, while visa processing and biometric enrolment are coordinated after people have exited Gaza with Foreign Office support.

A dedicated Gaza Family Scheme operating under this model would enable the Home Office to conduct the necessary eligibility and security checks while allowing eligible applicants who cannot access a visa application centre to provide their biometrics after leaving Gaza or reaching the UK. Once the Home Office has approved an application, the Foreign Office could then facilitate the person’s evacuation from Gaza and onward travel to Britain.

This is not a question of precedent or policy know-how; it’s a question of political will.