A man living in the UK has said he believes his sister-in-law who died from cancer in Gaza would still be alive today if the Home Office had agreed to bring her and her family to Britain. Anwar, who lives in Glasgow, fled Gaza in 2020 and was granted refugee status in the UK in 2021. After the destruction of large areas of Gaza by Israeli forces following the Hamas attacks on Israel in October 2023, he applied to bring his brother Hassan, Hassan’s wife, Maryam, their two young children and other family members to the UK in October 2025.
He said the Home Office rejected their application. The process required them to travel to a visa application centre (VAC) for biometric checks, but there was not, and still is not, a VAC in Gaza. It is difficult for Palestinians to leave the territory to access a VAC elsewhere.
In April this year the family asked the Home Office to waive this requirement and grant permission for “predetermination” of their application and “biometric excusal”. The Home Office is understood to have rejected this request, so the family launched a legal challenge. The Home Office agreed to reconsider its decision but issued a new refusal in July.
Prior to the second Home Office refusal, and shortly after Maryam gave birth to Ismail, who is now seven months old, she was diagnosed with renal cell carcinoma, which had spread to her lungs. Doctors in Gaza said they did not have the facilities to treat her. The family provided the Home Office with medical evidence concerning Maryam’s condition, including cancer test results and medical referral reports.
They also provided evidence of their living conditions in Gaza, which involved sleeping in tents and shortages of food, medicine and clean water. Anwar said the Home Office again refused the family’s request for predetermination and biometric excusal but that it accepted the evidence of Maryam’s cancer. In the Home Office’s letter refusing the visa application on 31 July, seen by the Guardian, officials stated: “Given the current situation in Gaza, reliable healthcare may not be accessible.” They accepted that Maryam was facing a significant risk of harm because she was in a conflict zone and could not travel to a VAC.
Although the Home Office officials found the circumstances relating to travel to a VAC “somewhat compelling”, they concluded that owing to the difficulty in travelling to the VAC, it was “in the best interests of the children to stay with their parents and delay travel to the UK” for the time being. They concluded the family’s situation did not meet the threshold for “compelling circumstances” and said that pre-entry checks needed to be carried out because the family came from “a territory where terrorists operate”. In the legal challenge, the family’s lawyers stated: “It is difficult to understand what circumstances would ever qualify as compelling if the present circumstances do not.” Gordon McKee, the Labour MP for Glasgow South, raised the family’s case with ministers in June.
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