The Diaspora
Diaspora families spend years on paperwork to bring relatives out of Gaza
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The Newsdesk gathers reporting from wire services and primary sources and rewrites every story in-house before publication. How our journalism is made →
There is a category of Palestinian family that exists mostly as a file. A husband works in the Gulf or Europe on a residency his employer controls; his wife and children are registered in Gaza; and the marriage lives inside an application for family reunification that no office has processed since October 2023.
Local estimates put roughly 950 wives in that position inside the Strip, mothers of about 1,500 children, on the count carried by The New Arab. Each of those households was mid-procedure when the war closed the procedure.
What the paperwork actually is#
Family reunification for Gaza is not one form.
It is a permission granted by the Israeli authorities that decides who may hold a Palestinian identity number and who may move between the Strip and anywhere else, layered over an Egyptian entry decision at Rafah and, for the destination country, a visa system that mostly has no category for a person whose passport is issued by an authority that does not control the border.
Since February 2026 the Rafah crossing has reopened for limited traffic — the only Gaza exit that does not pass through Israel. In the first fortnight after it reopened, 165 people left for Egypt and 94 Palestinians were allowed back in. Departures have since been running at fewer than a hundred people on most days, with priority to medical patients and a limited number of companions.
Return is its own sequence: prior authorisation from Israeli security services, an EU verification at the crossing point, then a second identification managed by the Israeli army. Egypt's information service has been publishing the returning batches by number; the batch that arrived on 9 August was the seventy-second.
What the delay does to a family#
The practical effects compound. A child registered in Gaza cannot be enrolled in a school abroad. A wife cannot open a bank account in the country where her husband works. A residency permit that depends on a family's presence lapses while the family is on a waiting list.
Save the Children, marking two years of closure earlier this year, described families still waiting on developments with no date given to them.
And the file itself decays: documents expire, the office that issued them may no longer exist, and a marriage certificate from a Gaza City registry can now require the reconstruction of a building's archive before it can be reissued.
What would change it#
Reunification is an administrative act, not a construction project, and that is the point worth stating plainly. Restarting the procedure requires an Israeli decision to process applications, an Egyptian decision on transit, and destination states willing to open a named family-reunification route — the mechanism several European countries built quickly for Ukrainian families in 2022 and have not built for Palestinian ones.
Until then, the paperwork is where these families live.
