Two successive Liberal governments have blundered the special visa process and have a backlog of thousands of applications, lawmaker says
Omar has paid a whopping $120,000 out of his pocket to facilitate the evacuation of some of his family members from Gaza into Egypt.
He described much of the payment as a "bribe" to an Egyptian travel company - a scandal that Middle East Eye investigated last year.
Such a story is not at all unique for Palestinians in the diaspora desperately waiting to be reunited with their loved ones, or at the very least see them to safety in a third country.
Omar, the founder of the online community Gazan Canadians, who asked that his last name be withheld, has so far managed to bring one of his seven sisters to Canada, along with her husband and children. But another, who is undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, remains in Egypt along with his mother.
His father and brother are still in the enclave, surviving in a tent.
"We are too tired to fight. I am exhausted. I lost my job, relationship, my money, everything you can imagine, but I am willing to take it till the end, because my family is going to die," Omar, a former tech worker in Vancouver, British Columbia, told MEE.
He is one of several Palestinian Canadians who travelled to the capital, Ottawa, on Monday, to urge the government to speed up visa processing, pressure the Israelis to provide exit permits, and forego detailed background checks until Palestinians are first evacuated to a safe third country en route to Canada.
The Canadian government has pledged to bring in 5,000 Palestinians from Gaza on special visas.
That announcement came in January 2024 and has been carried from one Liberal government, under Justin Trudeau, to the next, under Mark Carney.
But nearly two years on, less than a quarter, only 886 Palestinians, have arrived in Canada from Gaza, and it remains unclear exactly how many of them are even part of the 5,000-person cap, because different families utilised different immigration programmes depending on their chances. (more...)
'Bureaucratic genocide': Palestinian Canadians urge Ottawa to evacuate their families from Gaza
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