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Zuhria Al Hattab survived the night the sky fell on her grandmother's house in northern Gaza.
She survived the journey south — hands raised, white flag up — along a corridor the Israeli military had designated a 'safe route', until the bombs started raining again.
"The whole road was blood and martyrs and body parts, severed heads, severed hands," she tells SBS News of the aftermath of Israel's bombardment during the daytime truce.
"I was crying the whole way … but we had to keep walking continuously without stopping, not looking right or left."
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Al Hattab and her wounded brother, Mohammed, survived the journey out — a $10,000 passage through Rafah into Egypt, brokered by her sister, already safe in Australia.
They reached Perth in 2024. But most of the relatives her sister had applied to bring to Australia — including their father and younger brothers — never made it out.
Zuhria Al Hattab, 34, fled Gaza for Australia in 2024. Now rebuilding her life in Perth, she hopes for the chance to stay for good. Source: Supplied More than two years later, the 34-year-old primary school teacher is still struggling to rebuild her life. She now finds herself caught in a political reckoning over whether people like her should be allowed to stay.
For many Palestinians who escaped Gaza and made it to Australia, the journey to safety did not mark the end of upheaval. It was the beginning of a different kind of uncertainty.
The cohort in the crosshairs
Al Hattab holds a Temporary Humanitarian Concern visa, subclass 786, offered to Palestinians who fled to Australia after the conflict in Gaza escalated in October 2023.
The three-year visa — issued only on a case-by-case basis following mandatory health, character, and security checks — is the second step of the Australian government's Temporary Humanitarian Stay program.
It allows her to work, study and access Medicare, but expires in early 2028. Unlike the version offered to Ukrainians in the aftermath of Russia's invasion , it provides no pathway to permanent residency.
She is one of around 1,700 Palestinians who have arrived from Gaza, mostly on initial 12-month visitor visas — a cohort prioritised based on prior travel to Australia or strong family connections.
The federal government has issued about 3,000 visitor visas in total to Palestinians since October 2023.
However, like Al Hattab's relatives, hundreds of visa holders have been unable to leave Gaza, with Israel's siege and the closure of the strip's land crossings preventing their departure.
SBS News has spoken to others who have since secured permanent residency through separate migration pathways, but they say they still have little power to help family members left behind.
Sixteen members of the Al Hattab family, many of them children, remain in Gaza, sheltering in a makeshift tent. Source: Supplied The Gaza cohort in Australia has become the leading edge of a tougher immigration argument from the Opposition.
Outlining the first instalment of the Coalition's long-awaited immigration crackdown in April, Liberal leader Angus Taylor singled out the group, calling them high-risk and "entirely" in need of reassessment "with far greater scrutiny".
In the speech delivered at the Menzies Research Centre, attended by former prime minister John Howard — long associated with a hardline stance on immigration and border control — Taylor cast the Gaza arrivals as a symptom of what he called a "naive" immigration system.
"We must dispense with the naive thinking that has dominated our immigration policy for too long," he said in April.
"Our nation has paid the price for believing that anyone, from anywhere, will embrace our way of life."
From that, he drew three pillars: putting Australian values first, shutting the door on those who "abuse the immigration system", and "showing a red light to radicals". The reassessment of the Gaza cohort, he suggested, was where that tougher approach would begin.
Told of Taylor's comments for the first time, Al Hattab could scarcely take them in. The idea that her place in Australia might be reopened for negotiation seemed, to her, almost unimaginable.
"Oh my God, we can't go back ever, because there is no house," she says, her voice catching as she speaks.
There is nothing there. Now, Gaza is not safe. It's not a safe place.
In Gaza, her remaining 16-member family is surviving on little: a porous tent, scarce drinking water and festering illness.
"If we go back — oh my God, there is no place to stay there," she says.
To the suggestion that people like her could pose a risk to the country that took her in, her answer is plain.
"We are civilians. We are all civilians.
"We don't do anything bad."
A wider framework under strain
The Gaza arrivals are only one flashpoint in a…
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