A Circuitous Denial

Bashar was sixteen when he traveled from Gaza to Greece in 2019, accompanied only by his cousin of a similar age. Like hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers from various countries, he crossed into Greece by boat from Turkey, where he had flown to from Egypt — the only point of exit for most residents of the strip. He was planning to travel to Sweden to join his brother Haytham who had arrived in the country in 2014 after taking a boat from Alexandria to Italy. Haytham himself spent ten days at sea, during which several of his fellow passengers died, before arriving on European soil and being smuggled overland to Sweden. Given the rules of the Dublin Regulation in force in Sweden at the time, whereby an asylum-seeker’s application for protection must be made in the first European country of arrival, Bashar evaded official registration in Greece. He instead lived at a community-run squat in Exarchia in central Athens, one of many such solidarity housing initiatives at the time, while applying for family reunification based on his status as a minor. During the approximate year he spent waiting, he embedded himself in the various political and social struggles of the neighborhood. He felt at home in Athens, but Greece was not a place that could offer either material security or opportunity to a young Palestinian asylum-seeker.

When his request was finally granted, the Swedish embassy provided him with the relevant documents to travel legally. “We were very happy when he was accepted — because he would leave Greece safely, not with smugglers, and because there would be no more waiting there,” says his friend and fellow Gazan Tamer, who was in Greece at the time and arranged Bashar’s travel. However, his arrival in Sweden coincided with a hostile turn against the three-thousand-some Palestinian asylum-seekers then in the country. Advocacy groups described what amounted to “an organized campaign,” goaded by right-wing political forces, that saw Palestinian asylum-seekers arbitrarily prevented from obtaining new residency permits or renewing existing ones and denied the associated benefits to work and housing. Bashar was not allowed to live with his brother and was instead sent to a camp. Shortly after his eighteenth birthday, his asylum request was rejected. “Why would you accept someone and bring him safely to the country if you are just going to reject him?” asks Tamer. “You are just playing with him.”

Tamer had himself made a failed attempt at claiming refuge in Norway, where five of his family members had asylum, though his case was rejected. He spent four years in the limbo of immigration detention before returning to Gaza under threat of deportation in 2012. After living in Greece for three years — his third asylum-seeking venture to Europe in the space of ten years — he was finally granted protection in Belgium on medical grounds in 2023. “I was a human without an ID for all that time in Norway,” he says, explaining that this protracted uncertainty often coerces asylum-seekers to return voluntarily. “After that, even if another war had started in Gaza, I would think that it’s better to go back. It is very hard to live like a nonperson.”

Around the same time as Bashar’s rejection, Haytham’s five-year residency permit was canceled and replaced with a one-year permit. Despite organized protests and hunger-strikes by Palestinian asylum seekers in the country, the Swedish authorities persisted in curtailing permits. “You spend years living in the country, you have your ID, you go to work or school, everything, and then you go to renew it and they refuse your file,” explains the boys’ older brother, Nayef, who now lives in Belgium but himself spent two years in Sweden before being deported to Gaza in 2020. “It was just like for this for everyone, totally without reason.”

Haytham and Bashar were soon likewise slated for deportation — a lengthy process for Gazans as it relies on Egyptian authorities accepting deportees in accordance with the erratic opening of the border crossing at Rafah. Without a Palestinian passport, Bashar was left in further limbo since Egyptian authorities refuse to accept Gazans without documents. He was forced to remain in detention until he had been issued a Palestinian passport so that Sweden could then deport him.

Responding to questions from Jacobin about Sweden’s policy toward Gazan asylum-seekers at that time, a representative of the Swedish Migration Agency stated that it has “made varied assessments on different occasions regarding the situation in Gaza” and that its decisions were based on a “forward-looking assessment” of the prevailing situation in the strip. It further noted that the agency adopted a new legal position in 2021 that allowed all minors from Gaza to remain in the country on humanitarian grounds. The “forward-looking” assessments did not, however, appear to account for the risks posed to adults like Haytham and Bashar from the regular wars waged on Gaza. The brothers were returned to Egypt and then Gaza in May and July 2023, respectively. The explosion that killed them is said to have sent bodies hundreds of meters from the site. Haytham’s first child, a daughter, was born two days after his death.

The Gilded Gateway

The walls of the detention facilities beneath Cairo airport are covered in writing — the names and lengths of inmates’ stays and advice on how to avoid being extorted and robbed by Egyptian security officers. It is a facility where Gazans frequently find themselves detained in their efforts to reach Europe, for any number of arbitrary reasons. As the only viable route out of the strip, Egypt essentially views Gazans as cash cows, capitalizing on their plight. The price tag of a permit to exit Gaza via Rafah, paid to Egyptian officials, can range anywhere from $500 to $5,000 depending on demand. “They trade our tears and blood and suffering,” says Yahiya, who left Gaza in 2021 and now lives in Greece. As he explains, Gazans are transported in a closed bus directly to Cairo airport from where most can obtain a visa to fly to Turkey. What should be a six-hour journey overland took two days. “They left us to sleep on the sand in the middle of the desert — we are civilians coming from Gaza, but they really dehumanize us. Egypt is a nightmare for us.”

There are reports of Gazans being detained for months at Cairo International Airport — even being assumed dead at sea by families — in attempts to reach Europe. Egypt has repeatedly come under fire from international rights groups for its arbitrary detention and treatment of asylum-seekers transiting through the country. Nonetheless it remains a key ally in the EU’s campaign against “irregular migration” and a site to which member states are returning Gazan asylum-seekers despite their having rights to protection in Europe.

According to the Chicago Convention governing deportation procedures, failed asylum-seekers should be returned by the same airline carrier back to their point of departure or, alternately, to any country that will accept them. In recognition of the insecure circumstances for asylum-seekers in Greece, it is common for EU countries to give refugee status to those who have already been granted protection at their Greek entry point. Equally others have found themselves back in Greece after their claims for asylum in a second European country have been rejected. However, reports have recently emerged of asylum-seekers from Gaza with protection in Greece instead being deported to third countries, including Egypt, Jordan, and Albania. The Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) in Belgium estimates that there have been dozens of such cases of deportation from Belgium, returning Gazans to insecure conditions and uncertain fates. “Few refugees want to stay in Greece because there is no real reception and they are sleeping rough, so they take a flight from outside the EU in the hope of getting protection in Belgium because of the huge network of Palestinians here,” explains Ruben Bruynooghe, a JRS Belgium detention expert. “But the migration systems in Egypt and Jordan have a huge risk of indefinite detention and the safeguards on humane treatment are loose — they will try to break your spirits until you find a solution to get out yourself.”

Last summer, the JRS documented the cases of a number of Gazan asylum-seekers who traveled to Belgium from Cairo, but whose claims were rejected on the grounds of prior protection in Greece. Rather than being legally returned to Athens, Belgium deported the men to Egypt. One spent months in detention in Cairo, while another remains untraceable. “As long as he remains in Egypt, we don’t expect to have any confirmation from anyone about him,” says Bruynooghe.

Deterrence at All Costs

In March 2024, almost six months into the genocide in Gaza, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen traveled to Cairo together with a number of EU government leaders including of Greece and Belgium, to forge a new Memorandum of Understanding on migration. It was agreed that Egypt would receive an exorbitant €7.4 billion for its efforts to halt departures to Europe, with a commission spokesperson citing the country as a “difficult neighborhood bordering Libya, Sudan, and the Gaza Strip.” Though the largest sum to date, it is not the first time Egypt has been rewarded and praised for its role in policing migration across the Mediterranean, and the deal reflects a long-standing EU policy of cooperating with third countries to prevent asylum-seekers reaching the continent.

Europe’s strategy also includes a number of formal and informal mechanisms of deterrence in place in member states. Chief among these is the widespread tactic of using pushbacks at land and sea borders — an illegal and sometimes fatal yet systematic practice that has drastically reduced the number of arrivals to Greece from Turkey this decade. In the case of sea borders, this typically involves asylum-seekers being intercepted by masked border guards shortly before or after landing and set back adrift on motorless vessels in Turkish waters, often beaten and stripped of their possessions. When Yayiha arrived on the Greek island of Samos in 2021, it was only through the protection of a local NGO, who located them in the forest soon after their landing, that he and a few other members of his group avoided this fate while another fifteen were captured, put on a boat and towed back out to sea. But when his group were taken to the closed quarantine facility at the camp the same night, the authorities adopted other means of deterrence.

“We slept immediately because we were so tired,” he explains, “but then in the middle of the night five police entered and started shouting and beating the people — I mean really beating us.” It was only because of his good English that Yahiya was able to establish that they were being punished because they were obliged to line up to be counted at 10 p.m. each evening. Yahiya spent what he describes as a very difficult three and a half months at the camp before being granted asylum. While Gazan asylum-seekers in Greece are generally processed more swiftly than other nationalities and typically have their applications accepted, there is no guarantee of future security in the country, which is routinely criticized over conditions facing asylum-seekers there.

The genocide in the strip has given Palestinians, and Gazans in particular, new grounds for claiming asylum in Europe as member states can no longer feasibly reject applications on the prior pretext that “Gaza is safe.” These developments serve as an overdue but tacit recognition of the deadly circumstances — long predating October 7, 2023 — created by an Israeli campaign that the EU nonetheless continues to support both politically and militarily. The hypocrisy of this position is not lost on Palestinians. “When you don’t have any other chance to live as a human being, then you have to fight and take rights from the people who push occupation in your country,” says Nayef. Yet Gazan asylum-seekers like himself are also more than aware that a perilous journey to a continent that seeks to reject them is their only foreseeable lifeline. “They talk about human rights, but they make it make it impossible for us,” he says. “When we leave Gaza, we are not leaving for economic reasons or to just try to find a better life. We are leaving to survive.”