When Bassem Abudagga heard in 2022 that he had won a British Council scholarship to do his PhD in Britain, he was elated. “I was so proud,” he recalls. “It is what every academic in Palestine hopes for: to gain a qualification from the UK.
“It felt like a turning point for my career, my future, my family. It would shift my prospects to a completely different place.”
Full of optimism, Abudagga, a lecturer in business studies at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, which has since been destroyed by Israeli bombardment, arrived in the UK that October to take up his place at York St John University. His scholarship is one of many awarded annually under a prestigious scheme run by the British Council to build the capacity of Palestinian universities. “This was a British investment in me and in my country,” he says.
Abudagga’s only regret was that he would have to live apart for long periods from his wife, Marim, and two children, Karim, now four, and Talya, nine. While the whole family could have applied for visas to accompany Abudagga, the British Council made clear it could only cover the costs for him alone. It would have been too expensive for them all to leave Gaza, but it would be for the best in the long run, they believed.
Almost a year and a half later, the pride and excitement have long gone, and Abudagga is desperate. He wishes he had never come here. “At the beginning, I was so happy,” he tells the Observer. “Now I am just full of regret, that I am not with my family, when they are in such danger.”
His wife and children are trapped in Gaza, in acute and constant danger, living in increasingly desperate conditions. Every day he calls them on malfunctioning phone lines to hear the latest harrowing news of food and water shortages, illness, bombing and destruction, and the loss of friends.
If that is not painful enough, Abudagga faces another unequal challenge: confronting the same UK authorities that were so keen to welcome him here just two years ago, in the hope of persuading them to help him bring his family to safety.
The authorities have told him repeatedly that before they can get the visa application process off the ground, his wife must have fingerprints taken in Gaza and fill out the necessary forms. The only trouble is, Abudagga says, there are no facilities left to get fingerprinting done in Gaza – no communication system, no help, no infrastructure. So it is impossible to complete this first set of tasks before being able to cross the border to Egypt to complete the application process.
As one British source put it: “There are UK families and people with UK relatives getting out. So it can be done. You have to wonder how much of this is to do with the UK not wanting to give visas to Palestinians.”
On the morning of 7 October last year, Marim rang her husband from the family’s home in Abasan, near Khan Younis, and told him of the Hamas attacks, in which more than 1,300 Israelis had been murdered. “She said ‘we are now in a conflict zone’,” he recalls. “I knew from that moment that I had to get my family out and bring them here. The rules are clear that they are eligible to come to the UK to be with me. I was very frightened, very afraid.”
Since then, Marim and the two children have moved five times as the Israeli assaults have intensified and spread. Two weeks ago, Karim became ill and it was a desperate struggle to find medicine.
Marim, Talya and Karim are currently living inside the European hospital in Khan Younis, near Rafah, the town that is under threat of imminent Israeli attack. “My son became traumatised and depressed by the sound of the carpet bombing,” says Abudagga. “I would ring them and I would hear it in the background all the time. The hospital is so big it is the only place where he cannot hear the sound of the bombing.”
His case has been taken up by Labour MPs Rachael Maskell, the member for York Central, and Rebecca Long Bailey, who represents Salford and Eccles, where Abudagga lives and lectures part time.
Maskell said: “Through the British Council, the UK government invited Mr Abudagga to the UK as an academic to study. His family could have resided with him. They now have a duty to support his family to be reunited safely with him.”
Long Bailey said: “This is an urgent and harrowing situation. The government must establish an emergency family reunion visa scheme for desperate families impacted like this.”
A Foreign Office spokesman said: “The safety of British nationals is our top priority. We have helped more than 300 British nationals and their dependants to leave Gaza. A small number of eligible persons remain and we are working with Israeli and Egyptian authorities to support the rest of those who want to leave.”
The British Council said it was urgently supporting Abudagga’s case.
