By: Ehab Zidan
This investigation documents how Palestinian refugees holding Syrian travel documents are deprived of formal education in Egypt. Even though information on these refugees seems virtually impossible to obtain, since UNRWA does not keep records on them, the ARIJ network was able to collect data on about a hundred Palestinian families holding Syrian refugees documents. It shows that Palestinian children are being denied education; among them those who have never entered a classroom.
“We are waiting for the residency to come through so that our children can live. We don’t have a proper life… If the children can’t learn, then we don’t have a life at all,” is how Sanaa Mohammed (not her real name) describes the situation her family finds itself in.
Sanaa and her husband are Palestinian refugees holding Syrian travel documents. They came to Egypt following the war that broke out in Syria at the beginning of the last decade.
Sanaa says that her daughters, Rana, Mai and Dalia (not their real names), are deprived of schooling in Egypt because they do not have “residency”. The Egyptian Ministry of Education requires a valid residency permit to enrol a foreign or refugee student in school. This applies to both public and private schools.
Sanaa and her husband have had to resort to using online video tutorials to give their daughters Arabic and English lessons. Rana, 13, is studying the year six, primary curriculum, while her sister Mai, who is 12, is on the year five curriculum. Both are lagging behind their year-group peers in Egyptian schools.
The girls’ mother says they wake up early and listen out for their friend, who lives in the same building, as she sets off for school. When they hear her apartment door shut, the girls tell their mother, “Nada has gone off to school.” And in the afternoon, they watch from the window as the children of the neighbourhood come back from school.
Between 2011 and 2013, between five and six thousand Palestinian refugees with Syrian documents arrived in Egypt. That number has since gone down to about three thousand, after a significant proportion were forced to return to Syria or seek asylum elsewhere. This was because of the restrictions imposed by the Egyptian government, including refusing to grant residency, according to the comprehensive Survey of Palestinian Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons 2019-2021.
What happened to Mai and her two sisters may well happen also to surviving children of Palestinian families in the Gaza Strip, if they are forced out into Egypt. Children and their families in Gaza also face the risk of extermination, through the aggression waged against Gaza by the Israeli army since October 2023, in which more than 15,000 children have been killed, up to the date this report is published.
Sanaa quotes her youngest daughter Dalia, aged six, saying “If I went to Gaza, would they let me enrol to school?” Dalia, who was born in Egypt, asks her mother about children in Gaza, and whether they will be able to go back to school after the war ends. She asked this after drawing, with her tiny fingers, a rectangle and a triangle bearing the four colours of the Palestinian flag.
Rana and her two sisters are the fourth generation of refugees from the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, when Zionist gangs seized the properties of Palestinians in the areas they took over, displacing more than half the population, and committing “genocide”.
Muhammad Abdullah, a great grandfather, was forced with his family from their village of Difna, in the Safad district of Palestine. They left behind their house, their citrus grove, and their olive trees, when Zionist gangs seized control of the village, which they converted into a settlement in 1939.
Muhammad’s family sought refuge in Syria after the 1948 Nakba, subsequently settling in the Yarmouk camp, where the children and grandchildren received their schooling. One of them was Muhammad’s grandson Majid (not his real name).
The first wave of Palestinian refugees who migrated to Syria following the 1948 Nakba numbered around eighty-five thousand, about forty percent of whom came from Safad and the surrounding area.
Majid grew up in the camp, got married there and had two daughters. He had no inkling that he and his family were about to face a new exodus to another Arab country. But this time, education was not an option for his daughters, as it had been in the camp in Syria.
Majid’s family settled in Cairo, after he had travelled there in 2013, in the hope of starting a new life. But these hopes soon faded, after one of the passport offices in Cairo refused the renew his and his family’s residency papers. For six months Majid tried in vain to obtain residency. And he is still unaware of the reason why, despite having entered the country lawfully, it is still being denied to him and his family.
Palestinian refugees in Egypt who hold Syrian travel documents suffer a crude form of discrimination, as the Egyptian government refuses to allow UNRWA to assist them, on the pretext that it does not want any Palestinian camps set up on its territory. But, on the other hand, it refuses to treat them in the same way as Syrian refugees, who are given access to education, state health care and other services, according to the Ramallah-based Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights.
Palestinian refugees with Syrian travel documents living in Syria enjoy many of the civil rights accorded to Syrian citizens, like the right to own real estate – albeit with restrictions – and the right to own movable property. They are also able to travel and live anywhere in the country and have the right to run for membership or presidency of trade unions and to take legal action and appoint lawyers.
Majid says: ““Why not treat us as Syrians. We come from Syria and were born in Syria. The Syrians are getting on fine. Really, I’m not being jealous. I just mean we are like them.”
“If you look at my travel document, it says I was born in Damascus. And my wife was born in Damascus too, but I left Syria because of the war,” he adds.
State education in Egypt is open to refugees/asylum seekers from Syria and Yemen, from Sudan and South Sudan, just as it is to Egyptians. But they need to have valid residency permits, issued by the General Administration of Passports, Immigration and Nationality.
The little girls watch the local children coming back from school each day
“When I grow up, I want to be an Arabic teacher,” says thirteen-year-old Rana, though she is yet to go to school at all in Egypt. She and her sister did have lessons in Arabic, English and mathematics, however, from a teacher in the old neighbourhood, before they moved with the family to another neighbourhood.
The three sisters are not the only ones deprived of an education in Egyptian schools. The children of other Palestinian families holding Syrian travel documents are in the same boat.
Many such families resort to alternative educational solutions for their children. But these options do not allow the student to obtain a recognized academic certificate.
Egypt ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child back in 1990. This convention stipulates that states who are party to it recognize the child’s right to education, and in particular make primary education compulsory and available free of charge to all. The convention encourages countries to develop various forms of secondary education, whether general or vocational, and to make these available and accessible to all children. And it calls for appropriate measures, such as making all education free and providing financial assistance where needed.
The convention applies to children seeking asylum, or who are considered refugees under international and local laws, whether or not they are accompanied by their parents or someone else.
The Resource Centre for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights points out that, during the era of late President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Palestinians had more or less equal rights with Egyptian citizens. And, up until 1978, they had the same access to free public education as Egyptians. But after the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty was signed, the Egyptian government gradually began stopping Palestinian children from enrolling in public education institutions.
In the course of preparing this investigation, we contacted the UNRWA office in Cairo to find out how many Palestinian refugees in Egypt hold Syrian travel documents. We received two contradictory answers. In response to our first message, the office said that it “does not keep statistics on the number of Palestinian refugees holding Syrian documents, or on the number of those registered in Egyptian schools,” and referred us to the Palestinian embassy in Cairo.
In response to another message, the UNRWA office in Cairo then said it was “updating its number of Palestinian refugees who choose to register with UNRWA in Egypt.” The office stressed that it had neither the mandate nor the power to carry out a nationwide census of Palestinian refugees from Syria living in Egypt or in other areas where UNRWA works.
The UNRWA office in Cairo told us that Palestinian refugees from Syria face challenges in accessing basic services, and that only those refugees with valid residence permits are eligible to attend schools in Egypt.
UNRWA provides education services to Palestinian refugees in five regions: Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, as well as the West Bank and Gaza Strip in Palestine. The agency does not operate in Egypt, where it maintains only a representative office in Cairo, which UNRWA says is unable to provide any services to refugees.
The author of this report contacted several organisations, including research centres and organisations specialising in Palestinian affairs, but none had up-to-date information on the numbers of Palestinian refugees with Syrian travel documents.
However, in conducting this investigation, ARIJ was able to collect data on 97 Palestinian families living in Egypt with Syrian travel documents. All of these families have sons and/or daughters of school age. Our analysis involved documenting data on each case for verification.
According to the survey sample, the vast majority of families entered Egyptian territory through border crossings (airports, ports, or land crossings). The sample was also concentrated in Cairo.
Data analysis shows that about a third (29 percent) of the children of these families have received no education at all. Some of them have reached the age of thirteen without having attended any school, or even studied at an educational centre or gone to an educational tutoring group.
The data also shows that about 47 percent of the children of these families are studying outside the confines of formal education. They rely either on educational centres known as “Syrian centres” (educational facilities set up for those who arrived from Syria fleeing the war) – or on educational tutoring groups outside school, or other options.
The decision by some countries in early 2024, to stop funding UNRWA, threatened to halt its support for Palestinian refugees in its areas of operations, where it provides basic services such as health care and education.
An UNRWA report – published a year before the outbreak of war in Syria – indicates that Palestinian refugees in Syria were outperforming their counterparts in the country’s state schools by a wide margin, based on tests of student achievement in basic subjects.
Syrian refugees are able to enrol their children in regular private schools in Egypt, but this is not an option for Palestinians with Syrian travel documents. If they do enrol their children in these schools, they will not obtain a school certificate unless they have a valid residence permit.
As for “Syrian Centres”, Mustafa Salah (not his real name), who worked as a teacher in one of these centres in the “6th of October City”, says those are just like schools, with children divided into regular classes. Most of them are not licensed by the Egyptian Ministry of Education.
The tuition fees at a Syrian Centre range from nine thousand to fifteen thousand Egyptian pounds a year ($190 to $316 approximately) for a child in kindergarten or at primary or preparatory level. Fees for secondary school students are between eleven and twenty thousand Egyptian pounds ($232 – $421 approximately). It is difficult for Palestinians to afford such a considerable sum, since, without residency permits, they have to work informally in Egypt, which means they earn less than their local peers.
The average monthly income for urban families in Egypt in 2020 was approximately 6,600 Egyptian pounds (about $139), according to the Egyptian Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics. CEOWORLD magazine, meanwhile, reports the average monthly salary in Egypt to be at $222 dollars (10,500 Egyptian pounds).
“You are Syrians, you are Syrians!… We are not Syrians, I am a Palestinian from Haifa who used to live in Syria,” Asaad Majdalani explains that Palestinians with Syrian travel documents in Egypt receive no support from the Palestinian embassy. “The Palestinian embassy offered us nothing. I met the ambassador, Diab Al-Louh, ten times but we got nothing from him…the embassy has just washed its hands of us.”
Majdalani says that Palestinian refugees with Syrian travel documents can renew travel documents or obtain things like civil or family registration from the Syrian embassy in Egypt. So the Palestinian embassy is not even involved in issuing their documents.
Mohammed Farhat, a former researcher at the Egyptian Foundation for Refugee Rights, explains that Palestinians theoretically enjoy the protection of UNRWA, since they are among groups not covered by the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.
But he believes Palestinians should receive international refugee protection under the 1951 convention, arguing that UNRWA services are ineffective in Egypt, even if it does keep an office open there.
We contacted the spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the Middle East and North Africa, Rula Amin, and she said that the Egyptian government did not recognize any UNHCR mandate towards Palestinians, including Palestinian refugees from Syria. On an exceptional basis, the UNHCR had registered some Palestinian refugees from Syria as family members of other recognized refugees. But she was clear that providing any non-citizens with government services, like health and education, was subject to the regulations of the state and at the discretion of states and entities responsible for these services .
Amin explained that the Egyptian government had agreed to a coordinated UNHCR and UNRWA effort to provide cash assistance and some subsidized health care services to Palestinian refugees from Syria (who had been in Egypt before October 7th) through the Egyptian Red Crescent.
The Palestinian National Fund (PNF) is the financial and administrative wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization (Fatah). According to the Fatah website, the PNF provides help to Palestinians in diaspora countries, including Egypt, by covering the costs of medical treatment, and educational, living and travel expenses for needy cases, within the limitations of its budget.
The practice of denying rights to Palestinian students with Syrian travel documents does not seem to be based on any clear guidelines. The author of this report found that a small number of students who had previously obtained residence papers had nevertheless been unable to renew them, up to the date this report is published.
Among them is Ahmed Khaldoun, currently in the third year of secondary education at a private school in the Gesr El Suez district of Cairo. In previous years, Ahmed obtained an education residency that allowed him to enrol in a private school. But the delay in issuing the permit this year (2024), means he runs the risk of not being able to sit his exams, even though his family have paid the fees for the academic year in full.
Najwa Qasim, Ahmed’s mother, says: “We haven’t yet got it (the residence permit), even though we applied last October. Every time we ask, they tell us to wait a bit longer, which means there must be something wrong.”
“I am Syrian, so if it was just me applying for residency, I’d get it in a week. But since I’m applying for my children, it’s usually delayed two or three months… that’s because my husband is a Syrian-Palestinian, and there is always a security inquiry and other procedures.”
Three Palestinian sisters with Syrian refugees documentation are kept from going to school because they don’t have Egyptian residency
Majid Asaad says that he left Syria to escape the war, and in search of a better life for himself and his family: “But this second life turned out to be more difficult… wherever we go, life is hard, hard, hard… a residency gives you life.”
It was not easy for Majid to rent a place to live, and he had to resort to a real estate broker to solve the problem. Majid works eight hours a day in a sewing workshop owned by a Syrian. He is on the lookout for additional work to provide for his family, but fears prosecution due to him not having a residency.
Majid was unable to obtain a birth certificate for his youngest daughter: “I don’t dare approach any government agency, and if her mother (his wife) hadn’t managed to get the certificate, I’d never have gone to get it myself.”
Lack of residency permit also stopped Majid from making a complaint against a neighbour, who had assaulted him, fearing that if he did so, he would turn from victim to perpetrator and be arrested.
“Don’t come back again. If you do, you’ll be deported.” This is what they told Ahmed Saeed (not his real name), a Palestinian with a Syrian travel document, when he went to a passport office to renew his residency. Ahmed says that an officer there threatened to deport both him and his family if he ever returned to the office.
Ahmed lives in Cairo with his family. He has two daughters and three sons. His daughter Manar had to stop going to her private primary school, because the administrators there refused to let her move up to Year Two. This was because her father was unable to renew the family’s temporary residency permit. Ahmed says that other Syrian families, who had entered Egypt at the same time as them, had been able to obtain their residency and sort themselves out.
The head of the community of Palestinians with Syrian documents, Asaad Majdalani, says that the Passport Administration section of the Egyptian Ministry of Interior has taken to stamping the word “deportation” in the passports of Palestinians with Syrian travel documents, albeit without taking steps to implement it.
Egyptian law states that anyone who fails to comply with a deportation order faces a jail sentence of between three months and two years with hard labour, a fine of 50 to 200 Egyptian pounds, and six months imprisonment if he returns to the country, according to Law No. 89 of 1960, which applies to the entry and exit of foreigners.
Nour Khalil, an Egyptian researcher on immigration and asylum issues, says that Egypt faced international condemnation after it deported Eritrean refugees, as acknowledged by independent experts, after their cases had been taken up by UNHCR.
Asylum seekers who are returned to Eritrea are at risk of torture and ill-treatment, especially those fleeing compulsory military service, while most of them are likely to face arbitrary detention and be held incommunicado in inhumane conditions, according to Amnesty International.
Khalil adds: “A Palestinian refugee with Syrian documents is given a deportation notice based on what? And when he is deported, where is he supposed to go? He has no choice.”
Khalil thinks the Palestinian embassy in Cairo bears a great deal of responsibility, because it has the right to issue identification documents and could work with the Egyptian government to facilitate the process of Palestinians obtaining residency permits, so they can exercise their rights in Egypt.
According to Khalil, the Egyptian government, the Palestinian embassy, the UNHCR and UNRWA all share responsibility for the safeguarding rights of Palestinians with Syrian traveldocuments. Khalil says that the Egyptian government and parliament have the responsibility to remedy legislative or legal shortcomings, as those are persons resident in the country.
Khalil says: “The problem over granting residency began in 2015. There was no official decision taken to stop granting residency; the Passport Administration merely informs people of this orally.” He points out that any decision issued by an administrative body should be official and the reasons for it set out clearly, so that those affected can appeal it, something which did not happen in this case.
It is not just formal education, but a whole host of other rights that are denied to those without residency permits. These include the right to own a mobile phone SIM card, and the right to work. They cannot access medical services, cannot receive aid or services from civil society and development associations, and are barred from all legal dealings. And not having residency papers prevents people from filing complaints, according to immigration asylum expert, Nour Khalil.
He adds that, without residency, a person has no access to the justice system to appeal against deportation, nor can he appoint a lawyer to defend him. “Police departments deal with refugees on the basis of, ‘You’re lucky to be alive,’” says Khalil.
Ahmed Saeed (not his real name) says that someone tried to kidnap his daughter, but he didn’t report it because he did not have valid residency papers.
Majid is sure that he does not even have the option to leave Egypt: “Even if I wanted to go back, I wouldn’t be able to… Where would I go? No one would take us in, because we’re Palestinians.”
With the current 2024 academic year almost over, Rana and her two sisters will not be able to go to a local nearby school next year, and the girls and their family will remain stranded in Egypt. The family will not be able to leave the country, because of the accumulation of fines for delaying their residency renewal on top of the fees for renewing their travel documents.
While the Administration of Passports refuses to grant residency to Majid and his family, they would have to pay a “delay” fine if they left the country, which could amount to about forty-three thousand Egyptian pounds ($906 approximately).
The annual delay fine for each person is around one thousand Egyptian pounds (around $21) for the first three months, plus five hundred Egyptian pounds (around $11) for every additional three months.
“ I just can’t sleep from worrying. Sometimes I think, ‘Where am I going to? Why did I come here? Sometimes I think I would be better off dead,’” says Majid.
Sanaa is not optimistic about the unknown future that awaits her daughters and feels abandoned by everyone. “Even if I get the residency permit and my daughter is in the sixth or fifth grade, if I apply for her to start school, they will put her back in first grade.”
Chocking back her tears, she complains of the years her daughters have lost: “These six years have passed them by… Everything is gone, everything is gone.”
We contacted the Egyptian Administration of Passports, Imigration and Nationality/ the Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Palestinian Embassy in Cairo, the Palestinian National Fund, and the PLO Department of Refugee Affairs, and we are still waiting for a response. We asked the UNRWA office to provide us with the data it has on Palestinian refugees with Syrian documents, and we will publish the response as soon as we receive it.
We also wrote to the Syrian embassy in Cairo concerning its role in helping Palestinian refugees with Syrian travel documents in Egypt obtain residency papers, to allow them to access essential services, such as education, health care, and legal services.
