How Kiwis are getting their families out of Palestine

In late March, Minister of Immigration Erica Stanford said that issuing an emergency visa to family members stuck in Palestine would be “false hope” given there was no guarantee they could actually leave the country. Newsroom has now heard from Mohammed, a permanent resident in New Zealand who’s just helped 10 of his family members cross the southern border into Egypt. 

For the roughly 400 Palestinians (by Mohammed’s estimate) with ties to a Kiwi family, “of course” a visa would be better than nothing. For all of them, the current process is very much the same. Here’s how to get out of Palestine, and what an emergency visa would mean to those who make the escape.

It cost Mohammed nearly $70,000 to get his family members from Rafah, in southern Gaza, into Egypt. Paid to an Egyptian company called Hala Consulting and Tourism, these fees have quintupled since the war began. If you do not have the assistance of a foreign state department, Hala is your only option. It costs US$5000 for an adult and US$2500 for a child. Your names are put on a list, and for a month, you wait patiently for your names to be called on the daily register.

Rafah was officially meant to be the safe haven for Palestinians, but Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has now declared he will be invading the city “with or without” a ceasefire deal. Time is ticking, and Hala only allows a few busloads of people out a day, with millions hoping to make the trip before the city falls. 

It is a terrifying place to wait. Everyone is now in tents, but nobody sleeps because of the bombing. And that’s not the only noise; recently, said Mohammed, people have been lured out by the sounds of crying babies, barking dogs, or a football match. Which is strange, considering there’s no electricity. 

The sounds were being piped from armed Israeli quadcopters, he said.

“You will hear a crying baby, [so] of course, you will go outside searching for this crying baby. Where is that? And suddenly you will find the quadcopter in front of you, and it will shoot you.” Now, “even if [people] hear a crying baby, they will not go outside. Imagine that.” This was happening all over the Gaza Strip, Mohammed said. 

For the lucky few who make Hala’s list, the journey is anything but easy. Normally a six-hour trip, crossing into Egypt can take up to 24 hours. Mohammed’s family arrived at the Palestinian side of the border at 8am, and made it to Egyptian customs by noon. They didn’t leave for another 10 hours. 

Hala itself is not exactly a humanitarian organisation. Owned by Egyptian businessman Ibrahim al-Arjani, it has ties to Egypt’s private security network and militia groups. It has earned up to US$88 million from the border scheme since the war began.

Like any trip through customs, paperwork is unavoidable. This is complicated by the fact the vast majority of Palestinians have lost everything, including their passports, so they can’t prove their identity. 

The list of approved names on the Hala bus is screened by both Egyptian and Israeli authorities, and if they find anything objectionable about a passenger’s character, that person will be turned around.

But the lack of passports would not be a barrier to New Zealand entry, said Mohammed. Once in Egypt, Palestinians can go straight to their embassy and have their passports renewed, ready to take whatever the next step might be. This is where a humanitarian visa would be crucial: even if New Zealand couldn’t guarantee an exit from Palestine, having a visa upon exit would allow refugees to immediately flee the area, avoiding the bureaucratic limbo of Egypt. 

If you manage to find the thousands of dollars for a Hala bus and survive long enough to ride it, you would still need to apply for a visitor visa to New Zealand. And while Stanford said back in March there was a “dedicated number of staff at Immigration New Zealand” working on these visas, the application process still required a nearly 10-page document and NZ$246.

You also might need to get a medical check, “So, if I don’t have [one], what do I do?”

Mohammed believed the visa-processing system automatically screened out incomplete applications. A dedicated pathway could address this. 

He estimated there were only a few hundred people who would be eligible for refuge in New Zealand. “It’s nothing.”

He wasn’t sure what else could get the Government to act. “They hear everything and they know everything. They know [what’s going on] better than we do.” With all that awareness, Mohammed called for the Government to “be human”. But he didn’t sound hopeful, citing a double standard. 

Immigration New Zealand’s website says 80 percent of these applications are processed within two weeks, but Mohammed doubted the agency’s track record for Palestinian applicants. His application for permanent residency, which should take four months, took 16 months.

“Just think about it,” said Mohammed. “You are granting visas for a lot of people. Why? Why those people?” He said that after all the delays and hoops to jump through, he’d caught himself thinking “Why are people treating us like this? Are we from another world, are we terrorists?” 

Thanks to some crowdfunding, Mohammed had to pay about half of the cost out of pocket – still a small fortune. But it was worth it. When Mohammed’s family finally made it safely into Egypt, they slept for 24 hours. “Not a single person woke up,” he said. 

Stanford said on March 21 that “a special humanitarian visa is not a solution to the current crisis”. She’s right: creating this visa will not bring peace to the Middle East. Issuing a humanitarian visa to Ukrainian families did not solve the crisis there, either. But it did give 1879 people an option to start over.

She also said that “as and when the situation changes, we will reconsider our position”. Her previous reasoning was that she didn’t want to offer “false hope” because “it is a border issue”. Mohammed wondered how many people had to make the exit on their own dime before that situation would change.

But even if emergency visas are granted, that won’t expedite any exits. Hala does not care why people are leaving Palestine, they’re only concerned about the money. Without a state-facilitated solution, anyone with a visa will have to queue in the shadow of an invasion and under the steady buzz of swarming drones. 

It wouldn’t be false hope, said Mohammed. It would be better “to know that you have a visa … [another] way to live, and that there is a place that can accept you and give you a new life. It will be something, you know?”