New family unification approvals bring hope to Palestinians

Stuck in Gaza for the past 15 years, Munir Hamo may soon be able to reunite with his wife and six children in Jordan.

He is one of some 5,000 Palestinians who received rare Israeli approval earlier this month to be included in the Palestinian population registry, making them eligible for official documents such as Palestinian passports.

Under interim peace deals with the Palestinians in the 1990s, Israel, which captured the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 Middle East war, controls the registry.

It described the new registration approvals as a humanitarian gesture.

“I haven’t seen my children in 15 years. My sons and daughter got married, and I wasn’t able to attend their weddings,” Hamo said.

His long period in limbo began after he left Gaza for Jordan in 1981, a move which he said effectively led to his loss of permanent residency in the Palestinian coastal enclave occupied by Israel.

In 2006, a year after Israel pulled its troops and settlers out of Gaza, Hamo received a temporary travel pass issued by the Palestinian Authority to visit his ailing mother in the territory.

But he found himself trapped when both Israel and Egypt, citing security concerns, tightened travel restrictions on Palestinians at their borders with Gaza, controlled since 2007 by Hamas.

Hamo said he tried several times during the years to leave via Egypt’s Rafah border crossing, but was refused passage. In 2012, when Egypt briefly eased travel through Rafah, Hamo made it as far as the Jordanian border. But without a valid passport or identification papers, Jordan refused him entry, he said, and he returned to Gaza.

Now 58, Hamo, a retired civil servant, said he is eagerly waiting for his travel and identification documents to be issued.

“I felt as happy as a prisoner serving a life sentence who just learned he got an early release,” he said in his house in Gaza’s Bureij refugee camp.