The Diaspora
Gulf employers hold the papers that decide a Palestinian's residency
The DiasporaGraphic: 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 →
More than 745,000 Palestinians live and work across the Gulf states, the largest concentration of the working Palestinian diaspora anywhere in the world, and it is among the least reported.
Their legal footing varies by document, not by nationality. Some hold Palestinian Authority passports; others carry Jordanian temporary travel documents issued to Palestinians without Jordanian citizenship; others still hold Egyptian travel documents issued to Gaza-origin Palestinians. Each document opens a different visa track in each Gulf state, and none of them is a passport a Gulf immigration office treats the way it treats a state's own citizens' passports.
What the kafala system decides#
Residency across most of the Gulf Cooperation Council still runs through the kafala, or sponsorship, system: a worker's legal right to remain is tied to a specific employer, who holds the exit and renewal paperwork.
When a sponsoring employer dies, closes a business or ends a contract, the worker's residency clock starts running out — a risk that falls harder on Palestinian workers than on nationals of states with an embassy able to issue emergency travel documents on short notice, since the Palestinian Authority's diplomatic missions in the Gulf are thin and Gaza-origin holders of Egyptian documents have no PA consulate standing behind them at all.
What the money says#
The six GCC states sent a combined $131.5 billion in remittances abroad in 2023, World Bank data shows, a flow that has run through Palestinian Gulf communities since the 1950s and 1960s, when the region became what researchers call the diaspora's economic centre of gravity.
No Gulf state or the World Bank publishes a Palestinian-specific remittance breakdown, so the exact scale of what Gulf-based Palestinians send home to the West Bank, Gaza and Jordan is not a published figure.
Report the issue, not the individual#
Workers who described their residency status for this report asked not to be named, citing the risk of jeopardising a current sponsorship. Their account is consistent across the Gulf states: a job loss is not only an income loss but a countdown on the right to remain, one very few Palestinian workers there have an embassy able to reliably extend.
