Comment from Robina Qureshi:
What Does the Government Want Fathers to Do. Send Shrouds for Their Children?
It is shocking, shameful and unforgivable that the former Home Secretary and current Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper, knowing full well that family reunion was one of the few legal routes available to family members of recognised Palestinian refugees in the UK trying to escape what eminent Holocaust survivors and genocide scholars have described as genocide, still went ahead in September 2025 and suspended the family reunion route with only a few days’ notice.
We had to scramble to help people submit applications before the deadline and provide self-help guidance to others. Thankfully, we had already applied for Zakaria’s wife, a qualified pharmacist, and their three sons, studying online from their smartphones at university and school in Gaza. Little did we know we were walking into a bureaucratic trap.
I remember when a Home Office official spoke to us last year about the process for biometric deferral. I told her we would be pursuing this case to the end. I can’t forget the look on her face when she went quiet. I did not understand it at the time. Looking back, I think she could not bring herself to tell me that family members in Gaza would never be allowed to leave.
Well, let us see.
It shocks me that a family with a basic human right to be reunited with their husband and father in the UK has been trapped by administrative delay while he suffers severe mental trauma from separation, knowing his wife and children remain in a tent in Gaza amid bombardment, hunger and utter devastation.
A family reunion route that cannot be accessed is not a route at all.
The worst of it is that this family entered this process, which is still ongoing, with hope in the British government, yet the Home Secretary knew this was a closed loop and that the family were walking into a bureaucratic trap created by two government departments: the Home Office and the Foreign Office.
Dragging this out for almost a year and counting makes it more likely that family members could be killed or injured at any time.
What is it like for family members forced to watch all this from their phones?
Zakaria says he has become allergic to his mobile phone and dreads night-time calls, fearing he will receive the worst news from thousands of miles away. If his family is allowed to come to Glasgow, he says the first thing he will do is throw away his phone.
He often asks:
“I am a father, what does the government want me to do, send shrouds to Gaza for my children? What is the point of my life here if they are there? I am like an empty shell without my heart and soul. I have no choice but to comply with this process to the end, but I do not know what that end will be.”
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