Canada’s Inaction on Gaza Refugees Amounts to Racism, Say Families

When Mohammed Zaqout looks at recent photos of family in Gaza, he says they’re “unrecognizable.”

“The one who lost the most weight has lost over 25 kilos,” Zaqout said. “My 12-year-old [brother] has been fainting. Because there’s no flour — even the simplest things do not exist.”

Zaqout and other Palestinian Canadians with family members in Gaza have been trying to get their loved ones out of the war-torn region for the past 18 months. But even as conditions grow more and more dire, they say there’s been little movement from the Canadian government to speed up applications and evacuate vulnerable people.

The families, along with local activists, have been trying to raise awareness of the problems for the past six weeks. They’ve gathered at regular sit-in protests every Wednesday outside Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada offices across Canada, including in Vancouver.

Despite that action, they say they haven’t been invited to meet with any Canadian government officials to discuss the life-threatening delays in bringing their families to safety.

The Tyee previously reported on Nariman Ajjur’s attempts to bring her three-year-old nephew, Khalid; his mother, Ezdehar; and other members of her extended family to join her in Surrey.

Khalid and Ezdehar were previously injured in October 2023, when the building they were living in was bombed. Khalid’s father, Mohammed Ajjur, was killed in the airstrike.

Just two weeks ago, Ajjur told reporters at a press conference Wednesday, her father was injured in another airstrike.

“He was left bleeding for hours before he could even reach a hospital. I could have lost him,” she said.

Another Gazan who now lives in Vancouver, Mohammed Alzaza, has lost his three brothers in Gaza while waiting to bring them to Canada, organizers said. The Tyee previously told Alzaza’s story of coming to Canada as a refugee with the help of Independent Jewish Voices Canada.

In January 2024, Ottawa opened a temporary residence visa program for Gazans who have family members in Canada.

The program was capped at 5,000 people, quickly reached that limit and has been closed since March. According to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, a total of 1,750 applicants have passed security screenings and been approved to come to Canada, while 864 have actually arrived in Canada. IRCC says it is still working through the remaining applications and can’t provide a time frame for when they will all be assessed.

The situation in Gaza was dire months ago and has only gotten worse. Israel has blocked food aid from entering the occupied territory and has continued a military offensive in an attempt to crush Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza. Hundreds of people have now died of starvation, while a total of 62,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel’s offensive started in October 2023 in response to a deadly Hamas attack on Israeli civilians.

Human rights groups — including two Israeli organizations — have said Israel’s actions amount to genocide.

Canada’s application process for Gazan refugees with family in Canada is complicated and requires extensive documentation that critics say is difficult or impossible to get after the widespread destruction of infrastructure in Gaza.

Despite the bureaucratic roadblocks, both Ajjur and Zaqout say they have managed to complete the IRCC applications for their family members. And yet their families are still trapped in Gaza. With Israel controlling the borders, Canadian officials say they can do little to get applicants out of Gaza.

Zaqout said two of his family members, his father and one brother, are in Jordan because his father needed open-heart surgery. Even though his father and brother are not in Gaza anymore, Zaqout said, there hasn’t been any progress from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to clear them to come join him in Vancouver.

Advocates say the delayed process stands in stark contrast to the measures Canada took at the start of the Ukraine-Russia war, allowing 300,000 Ukrainians to seek safety in Canada through special immigration programs.

“This pattern reveals a deeply racist system,” Ajjur said.

Alison Gu and Daniel Tetrault, two Burnaby city councillors, also attended the press conference to voice their support. They called on the federal government to act.

“Working in politics, we understand that everything we do is a choice,” Gu said.

“Designing a bureaucratic program with so much red tape that it seems like it is destined to fail was a choice. Not getting family members out of the way with bullets and bombs is a choice. The fact that Prime Minister [Mark] Carney has focused a couple statements and empty words, instead of focusing on the task at hand, which is to get loved ones out safely, is a choice.”

Hilary Homes, a campaigner with Amnesty International Canada, said there has been little transparency from the Canadian government about what officials are doing to get people out of the region.

“When you think of other countries’ situations... governments have proudly stated how much they helped Ukrainians or how much they helped Syrians,” Homes said. “You had so many governments talking proudly about how they were assisting people. You just don’t see the same thing being said here.”

Homes said one rare communication from the government about evacuations came from Anita Anand, Canada’s foreign affairs minister. On July 26, Anand wrote on the social media site X that Canada had evacuated 11 Canadian children and their mothers from Gaza.

Homes said that small piece of information shows the Canadian government does have the ability to act to get people out.

“No other details were provided; there was never an official press release on the global affairs website,” Homes said.

“But what it does signal is that [government officials] do continue to be engaged in the issue, as frustrated as everyone has been around the program, clearly they are still engaging with the government of Israel. And in this case, there was a success in getting people out. So clearly they do know how to do that and it is in fact possible.”

Amnesty International Canada is calling for the opening of a humanitarian corridor to urgently evacuate all the program applicants. The human rights organization is also calling on the Canadian government to reform the family reunification program, saying the requirements are overly invasive and difficult to meet. The requirements include documentation of applicants’ entire work history since age 16, detailed information about scars on applicants’ bodies and proof of family relationships under Canadian legal standards.

Applicants must also complete biometrics checks, but those checks can be completed only once people have made it out of Gaza. According to Amnesty International, all of the applicants who received assistance from the Canadian government to evacuate already had biometrics on file.

“I think people feel more like they’re being treated like security risks than people in need of protection,” Homes said, “which is, I think, at the heart of the problems around the program and how people talk about the program.”

In at least two cases, families have had to leave the mothers of young children behind because they weren’t able to satisfy all the bureaucratic requirements.

While Canadians often speak of their “immediate” and “extended” family, Zaqout said that for him, there’s no difference between the two. He said it’s been excruciating to believe that his family will be reunited in a safe place — only to see those hopes dashed.

“We’ve been humiliated, we have been stressed, we have been lied to, and yet here we are, 22 months later, and we’re still waiting,” he said.