UK accused of raising false hopes among Gazans over new refugee resettlement scheme

The UK Home Office is facing claims that it raised false hopes among people in the Gaza Strip. It has emerged that the new safe route for Palestinian refugees will be open only to those who have already made it to Lebanon or Jordan.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced last month, at the Labour Party's annual conference, that a refugee resettlement scheme would reopen. A statement from her department said roughly one in four referrals would be for Afghan women and girls and Palestinian refugees fleeing war and persecution.

A restriction that went unmentioned

The organisation administering the scheme, the International Refugee Assistance Project (Irap), has confirmed it will refer only "a very small number of extremely urgent cases", to be processed in Jordan and Lebanon. Irap says humanitarian organisations in those countries will pass cases to it, after which it will hold interviews. It also says it does not know how many people the UK government will accept, as that depends on funding and local authorities' capacity.

The alliance Communities for Palestinians (CFP) says this key detail appeared neither in Mahmood's speech nor in later Home Office statements. CFP co-founder Vicky Moller said the conference applause reflected an understanding that the scheme would mean rescuing people from Gaza.

The Home Office rejects the criticism. A spokesperson said that to qualify for refugee status under international frameworks, a person must be outside their country of origin. Palestinians who remain in Gaza would not initially be in scope, but those who have fled could be referred through Irap.

Expert views

Jon Featonby, chief policy analyst at the Refugee Council, backed safe and legal routes but called for support to be counted in the thousands rather than the hundreds, and for the particular circumstances of Palestinian refugees to be recognised.

Dr Peter Walsh, a senior researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, said resettlement programmes are usually designed for people who have already left their country. Roughly 20,000 people were resettled in the UK from Syria's neighbouring countries between 2014 and 2021 under the Syrian scheme. Bringing people directly out of Gaza would be closer to an emergency evacuation, dependent on Israel and Egypt allowing departures and on security checks without a visa centre in Gaza.