Gaza on the Ground, Pages 14-15

A Trip to Nowhere: Gaza’s Passport Shortage Can Be a Matter of Life and Death

By Mohammed Omer

The original green-covered Palestinian passport. (Photo M. Omer)

TAXI driver Nahed Ibrahim, 37, is waiting for the next mail shipment to leave the Gaza Strip. He was able to secure a passport for his 4-year-old son, Bara, who needs to leave Gaza for medical treatment in Egypt. Now he must renew his own passport, however—and his application is caught in the mail.

Already confined to the tiny Gaza Strip by Israeli-controlled crossings to the north and east—and now the Egyptian closure in the south—Gaza’s 1.5 million Palestinians are facing yet another new travel restriction: The Hamas-run Ministry of the Interior has run out of paper and ink—and, as a result, passports. Ibrahim therefore had no option but to send his application to Ramallah, rather than visit the local passport office in Gaza.

Noting that the Interior Ministry has not received any shipment of passports since June 2008, passport office head Ahiad Hamada has accused Mahmoud Abbas’ Ramallah-based Fatah government of abetting Israel’s siege on Gaza.

“We have expressed concern that the problem be solved,” he said, “and our willingness to deal with any party ready to provide passports to the population in Gaza.” Hamada expressed disappointment that Ramallah has disconnected the shared-data network between Gaza’s Interior Ministry and the West Bank. “This facilitates fraudulent activity with official papers, as we have discovered lately,” he explained.

Prior to June 2007, when Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip after defeating an attempted coup by U.S.-trained Fatah fighters, the majority of passports were printed in and issued from Gaza. Since then, however, the Abbas government has demanded that Palestinians who wish to renew their passports send their documents to Ramallah—which, under interim peace accords with Israel, is the internationally recognized authority in charge of issuing Palestinian travel documents. Observers believe the real reason behind Ramallah’s not shipping passports, however, is to crush Hamas—despite the fact that it is ordinary Gazans who suffer, not Fatah’s political rival.

Every time Ibrahim contacts the Interior Ministry in Gaza, he gets the same reply: the special passport paper has not arrived from the printers in France. Because he has been denied entry to Israel, he can not accompany his child for treatment at an Israeli hospital. His only alternative is to obtain a Palestinian passport that will allow him and Bara to travel to an Egyptian hospital via the Rafah border crossing.

Time, however, is not in his son’s favor. It’s been a year since Ibrahim learned that his son’s epilepsy is worsening, causing more seizures and physical stress to the little boy’s entire body—an issue which concerns Bara’s doctors in Gaza. The medical treatment he needs is readily available in the Egyptian hospital; all his father needs is permission to travel there.

“Previously, in Gaza, it took only two to three days to obtain a passport,” Ibrahim said, noting that the neighborhood passport office is only a 15-minute walk away. “Now it takes 25 days to obtain a passport—if they are available at all,” he lamented.

A Tortuous Process

Where he once had only to fill out an application form and wait for his passport to arrive, Ibrahim now must go to a lawyers union to have his documents verified, then authorize someone in the West Bank to handle his passport on his behalf, since Ibrahim, along with virtually all 1.5 million Gazans, are denied passage out of Gaza through the Israeli-controlled Erez crossing. He then must find a shipping company to deliver the application to that authorized person to begin the procedure. When and if the application is approved, the whole process has to be reversed in order to get the passport back to Gaza. Not surprisingly, there have been a few cases in which documents have gone missing.

When he asks how long his passport delivery will take, Ibrahim said, “It’s always ”˜inshallah’ [God willing], because no one knows when.” Unlike many Gazans, however, he realizes he is lucky to know someone “who can act on my behalf in the West Bank.”

Not only is getting a passport complicated, it is expensive as well, often costing up to an additional 600 shekels (around $160), instead of the official price of 230 shekels. “How many thousands of shekels do I, just a taxi driver, earn, that I can afford to spend so much on passport renewal?” Ibrahim asked.

Since Israel sealed Gaza’s borders in June 2007, only a trickle of people are allowed to leave every few weeks, including patients requiring urgent medical care and some students. Like his fellow Gazans, Ibrahim requires a visa to go to any other country, and this will be his next challenge after he gets his passport. Thousands of Gazans who may have valid passports may have expired visas. New ones either may not be available, or it’s not possible for them to get their passport to the consulates in the West Bank and go through the same long process as Ibrahim.

According to Gaza’s Interior Ministry, each month approximately 10,000 Gazans apply for passports, and some 3,000 urgent cases are pending.

Although Abbas officially severed relations with Hamas following its takeover of Gaza, until 2008 the two governments worked together—albeit frostily—to provide basic services to their citizens. Following intervention by human rights groups in 2009, Abbas decreed that urgently needed passports could be sent to the Gaza Strip. That decree has not yet been implemented, however.

“We call on President Abbas to follow up on his decree and allow passport shipments to the Strip,” said Samir Zaqout, coordinator of the field research unit at Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, which has followed the issue of passport delays. For a period of time last year, the center confirmed, Hamas banned the practice of applying for passports by mail from the Fatah government in Ramallah. Now, however, said Ahiad Hamada, his ministry doesn’t stand in the way of Gaza applicants. “Post offices can contribute freely to ease the life of people,” he explained.

Amin Maqboul, a senior Palestinian Authority official with the Ministry of Interior in Ramallah, has acknowledged that the passport bottleneck was intended to pressure Hamas into reinstating Abbas loyalists who were fired from Gaza’s Interior Ministry last year. According to Maqboul, Hamas rejected the Fatah demand, and continues to employ their own people instead.

Taxi driver Ibrahim knows there is only one way out of this plight: “Both Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, should have national reconciliation,” he stated.

In the poverty-stricken Gaza Strip, those people waiting for passports are not planning their annual vacations or relaxing retreats abroad. Those luxuries are no longer even in the vocabulary of Gazans. Most are students, laborers employed abroad, those on family business or, like Ibrahim, those who themselves or whose family members require medical treatment not available in Gaza’s ill-equipped hospitals.

In March 2009, the Palestinian Interior Ministry in Ramallah introduced new black-covered passports which are compatible with electronic scanning equipment and comply with international standards. The old, green-covered Palestinian passports will remain valid until they expire, however. But Ibrahim does not care what color his passport is—as long as it can get him and his son to the medical treatment Bara needs. He has some small hope that a presidential decision will allow the shipment of passports to Gaza, but fears being used as a pawn in internal political conflicts.

“My concern is for my son’s health and safety,” he emphasized. Yet another worry is that, if Bara’s medical transfer document expires before his father’s passport arrives, then Ibrahim will face still another obstacle, renewing the original medical document. An official at the Ministry of Health told Ibrahim that his son’s case is not as urgent as some others. But the desperate father knows other people who were told the same thing, and who died waiting for their passports to arrive. He doesn’t want to watch his child die of seizures which can be easily treated just over the border, in Egypt.

Award-winning journalist Mohammed Omer reports on the Gaza Strip, and maintains the Web site. He can be reached at <>.