Imagine for a moment that you are a parent in Gaza. The bombs have been falling for months, your children have learned the sound of drones, and every night you wonder whether you will wake up. Then you hear that the British government, at the Labour Party conference, has reopened a resettlement scheme for refugees fleeing war and persecution. You hear that one in four referrals will be for Afghan women and girls and Palestinian refugees. For the first time in a long time, you allow yourself to feel something close to hope. But then the details begin to emerge, and the hope curdles. The Home Office is now facing claims that it gave false hope to the people of Gaza, because the new safe route for Palestinian refugees will only be open to those who have already escaped to Lebanon or Jordan. Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, announced the reopening of the scheme with words that seemed to embrace Palestinians in their moment of greatest need. Yet the body administering the scheme has confirmed that it would only refer “a very small number of extremely urgent cases,” and that all of these cases would be processed in Jordan and Lebanon. The gap between the announcement and the reality is not just a bureaucratic detail. It is a matter of life and death.
The umbrella alliance Communities for Palestinians, or CFP, has been vocal about this betrayal. They say the crucial restriction was nowhere in Mahmood’s speech or in the subsequent Home Office statements. As a result, people in Gaza and their supporters were left with the belief that they could apply, that the United Kingdom was finally opening its doors to those trapped inside the Strip. Vicky Moller, a co-founder of CFP, captured the anguish perfectly: “The applause at Shabana’s announcement at conference was at the prospect of a resettlement scheme for Palestinians fleeing war and persecution. People understood that would mean rescuing people from Gaza.” But that is not what the scheme does. The International Refugee Assistance Project, known as Irap, has been tasked with making referrals. Its website explains that it will refer “a very small number of extremely urgent humanitarian cases to the UK for consideration for resettlement.” These cases, it says, will be referred to Irap by humanitarian organisations in Jordan and Lebanon. Irap will then hold interviews to determine if the cases can be referred to the British government. The programme focuses on “extremely vulnerable refugees whose lives have become unsustainable in Jordan or Lebanon.” There is no mention of Gaza, no mention of the people sheltering in schools and hospitals, no mention of the families who have been displaced over and over again. There is only a narrow, carefully bounded route for a tiny number of people who have already managed to escape.
The Home Office has pushed back against the accusations, insisting that the resettlement scheme has always been for people outside their country of origin. A spokesperson said: “To qualify for refugee status under international frameworks, individuals must be outside their country of origin. Palestinians who remain in Gaza would not initially be in scope for these routes. However, Palestinians who fled Gaza could be referred to the UK through the International Refugee Assistance Project.” On the surface, this sounds reasonable. Refugee law is built on the idea that a refugee is someone who has crossed a border, someone who cannot return home. But the statement sidesteps a deeper reality. The United Kingdom has, in the past, created safe and legal routes that allowed small numbers of people to enter the UK from their country of origin, including previous schemes for Afghan refugees. If the Home Office could find a way to bring Afghans directly from Afghanistan, why not Palestinians from Gaza? The word “initially” in the Home Office’s response also raises questions. Does it mean the route could expand later? Does it mean there is a plan? Or is it simply a way to soften the blow? For Palestinians in Gaza, the distinction is not academic. They cannot simply travel to Lebanon or Jordan. The borders are sealed, the crossings are controlled by Israel and Egypt, and there is no visa centre in Gaza where they could even begin the process. The route, in practice, is closed to the very people who need it most.
The situation is made even more painful by the unique legal status of Palestinian refugees. Most refugees in the world fall under the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, but Palestinian refugees do not. They fall outside the remit of the refugee convention and UNHCR. Instead, UNRWA was set up to serve Palestinian refugees, defined as any person whose “normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948 and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” This means Palestinian refugees can be refugees while living in what refugee charities and NGOs refer to as Palestine, in other words, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as in second countries such as Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. This is a profound difference. A Palestinian family living in Gaza today may be descended from refugees who were expelled from their homes in 1948, and they may have been displaced multiple times since then. They are not foreigners in Gaza. They are not in a country of origin in the way the Home Office imagines. They are refugees in their own homeland, trapped by a legal framework that was never designed to protect them. To insist that they must leave their country before they can be considered refugees is to ignore the very history that created the Palestinian refugee crisis in the first place. It is to demand that they somehow escape a cage before offering them safety.
Experts have also weighed in on the limitations of the scheme, and their words add both clarity and sadness. Jon Featonby, the chief policy analyst at the Refugee Council, said ministers should recognise the particular circumstances that meant Palestinians could be refugees while living in their own country. He said: “The government is right to commit to safe and legal routes. They provide a vital way for refugees to reach safety without having to put their lives in the hands of smuggling gangs. But the warm words have to be accompanied by ambition, and that means supporting people in the thousands, not the hundreds. They must also recognise the particular circumstances of Palestinian refugees and be accessible to them no matter where they are in the world.” Dr Peter Walsh, a senior researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, explained that resettlement programmes are usually designed as a solution for people who have already left their own country. He pointed to the Syrian scheme as an example: the roughly 20,000 people resettled to the UK between 2014 and 2021 all came from countries around Syria, with nobody, to his knowledge, being flown directly from Syria. Bringing people directly out of Gaza, he said, would be a different kind of programme, closer to an emergency evacuation. And crucially, such an emergency evacuation in Gaza would depend on Israel and Egypt letting people leave, and on the Home Office finding a way to do security and biometric checks with no visa centre in Gaza. This is not to say it is impossible. It is to say it requires political will, international negotiation and a genuine desire to save lives.
In the end, the story of this resettlement scheme is a story about the difference between appearance and substance. The government can stand on a conference stage and speak of Palestinian refugees fleeing war and persecution, and people will clap because they believe something is being done. But when the applause fades, the fine print remains. The Home Office says it is committed to safe and legal routes, but the route it has opened is only for a very small number of extremely urgent cases in Jordan and Lebanon. It says Palestinians who have fled Gaza could be referred, but it does not say how they will get to Jordan or Lebanon, or what will happen to them if they cannot. It says the scheme depends on funding and local authority capacity, but it does not say when it will expand, or how many people will actually be accepted. For Palestinians in Gaza, this is not a policy debate. It is a question of survival. Every day they wait, the danger grows. Every day they hope, the reality becomes more desperate. The Home Office may be technically correct that refugee status under international frameworks requires a person to be outside their country of origin, but that technicality feels hollow when the people of Gaza are dying in their own land. The people of Gaza do not need more warm words. They do not need applause lines at party conferences. They need a door that actually opens. They need a government that is honest about what it can offer, and then brave enough to offer more. The announcement gave false hope, and false hope is a cruel gift. It is time for the United Kingdom to either create a real pathway for Palestinians in Gaza, or to stop pretending that this one is for them. The applause at the conference was for the idea of rescue, and the people of Gaza deserve nothing less than the real thing.