'Bureaucratic genocide': Palestinian Canadians urge Ottawa to evacuate their families from Gaza
'Bureaucratic genocide': Palestinian Canadians urge Ottawa to evacuate their families from Gaza
Omar has paid a whopping $120,000 out of his pocket to facilitate the evacuation of some of his family members from Gaza into Egypt.
He described much of the payment as a "bribe" to an Egyptian travel company - a scandal that Middle East Eye investigated last year.
Such a story is not at all unique for Palestinians in the diaspora desperately waiting to be reunited with their loved ones, or at the very least see them to safety in a third country.
Omar, the founder of the online community Gazan Canadians, who asked that his last name be withheld, has so far managed to bring one of his seven sisters to Canada, along with her husband and children. But another, who is undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, remains in Egypt along with his mother.
His father and brother are still in the enclave, surviving in a tent.
"We are too tired to fight. I am exhausted. I lost my job, relationship, my money, everything you can imagine, but I am willing to take it till the end, because my family is going to die," Omar, a former tech worker in Vancouver, British Columbia, told MEE.
He is one of several Palestinian Canadians who travelled to the capital, Ottawa, on Monday, to urge the government to speed up visa processing, pressure the Israelis to provide exit permits, and forego detailed background checks until Palestinians are first evacuated to a safe third country en route to Canada.
The Canadian government has pledged to bring in 5,000 Palestinians from Gaza on special visas.
That announcement came in January 2024 and has been carried from one Liberal government, under Justin Trudeau, to the next, under Mark Carney.
But nearly two years on, less than a quarter, only 886 Palestinians, have arrived in Canada from Gaza, and it remains unclear exactly how many of them are even part of the 5,000-person cap, because different families utilised different immigration programmes depending on their chances.
"They all kind of got lumped in," Jenny Kwan, a member of parliament for the leftist New Democratic Party, told reporters from Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Monday.
"The government changes their story persistently, and it's different procedures and different reasons or excuses of why people cannot come to safety. They keep saying that they have to do biometrics, when the government knew very well in the region there was no way that [Palestinians in Gaza] could actually get their biometrics done," Kwan said.
A "workaround" is needed, she added, because "not every single Palestinian is a terrorist... stop judging them as such".
'It's hate'
Kwan pointed to the 2022 Ukraine emergency programme enacted in Ottawa, following Russia's invasion that year.
"The government actually even bypassed biometrics, and people didn't have to go through an onerous application process, and there was no cap, and many, many people made it to safety. And that was the right thing to do... we want these families to be treated the same," she added.
Gur Tsubar, a member of the Jews Say No to Genocide Coalition, said in a statement that 1,287 Palestinians from Gaza had already cleared policy requirements but are waiting on security screening, while roughly 600 others are still under eligibility review. In Egypt, more than 2,500 applicants are similarly caught up in security clearance issues.
'It's racism - anti-Palestinian racism - it's Islamophobia, it's everything you can name in that category, but I think also it's hate'
- Omar, founder of Gazan Canadians
"Collecting biometrics inside Gaza is impossible under siege and bombardment. Movement through Rafah or Kerem Shalom is severely restricted, families are routinely denied permission to leave for fingerprinting or interviews, even when they hold Canadian approvals," Tsubar wrote.
Indeed, the government's own website for special visas from Gaza clearly spells out that "the Government of Canada doesn’t decide who can leave Gaza [or] guarantee that you’ll be authorized to exit Gaza".
It does not say, however, that Israel is in control of all exit permits, despite the assertion that a Hamas government runs Gaza, and the Rafah border is shared with Egypt, not Israel.
"Proposals for mobile biometric units, trusted third-country facilities, or Red Cross-administered solutions have been flatly dismissed [by Canada], leaving families trapped in an administrative dead end while their loved ones starve and die," Tsubar said.
He told reporters at the briefing alongside Kwan and Omar on Monday that Prime Minister Carney will "go down in history as the master of bureaucratic genocide".
Carney was at the United Nations headquarters in New York on Monday for the landmark conference on the two-state solution, where Canada, alongside some of its European allies, recognised the State of Palestine in what both pro-Palestine and anti-Palestine voices have described as mere symbolism.
"There is something even more urgent than that, and that is to honour the promise that the Canadian government made to Palestinian families, and... get their loved ones to safety, remove the barriers, do what is necessary," Kwan said.
MEE put questions directly to the relevant agency, Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
Marku and Lee, an immigration and refugee law firm in Toronto, filed a lawsuit earlier this year on behalf of 53 Palestinian families who are currently in the Gaza Strip to ask the Federal Court of Canada to process the applications without delay.
The firm says half its clients are children, the youngest of whom is seven months old. They expressed concern that the Canadian government had let the applications “sit in limbo” while conditions in Gaza had progressively worsened and the enclave had become uninhabitable since the scheme was launched more than a year ago.
“While waiting, our clients have been exposed to life-threatening and inhumane conditions in the Gaza Strip. All of our clients have had their homes bombed to the ground. They have been subjected to repeated air strikes and starvation. They have fallen ill or been injured, with no access to medical treatment," the firm said in a statement.
Omar told MEE Palestinians have been so "dehumanised" that they are not perceived like any other refugees.
"It's racism - anti-Palestinian racism - it's Islamophobia, it's everything you can name in that category, but I think also it's hate. I think Canada has always hated indigenous communities and indigenous people. And for us Palestinians, we are indigenous".
