Salma* struggles to sleep at night.
As she lies on a donated bed in a stranger’s house in south-west Sydney, she is overwhelmed by memories of her siblings and the ill father she left behind in tents in Rafah, and the family homes in north Gaza that have now been destroyed. But those memories are not what keep her up.
“I’m very worried,” she tells Guardian Australia through an interpreter. “I can’t sleep from the stress, because I don’t have money to pay rent.”
Salma’s young daughter sits next to her in a purple summer dress in a sterile room at the Settlement Services International office in Liverpool.
By the end of the month the pair are likely to be homeless.
They arrived in Australia on 1 January on visitor visas after fleeing Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. On the subclass 600 visa, Salma is considered a tourist and is unable to work. She relies on the generosity of community groups and charities to house, feed and clothe herself and her child.
Between 7 October and early February, just over 330 Palestinians arrived in Australia on visitor visas, according to a government spokesperson. Community organisations say they are stretched, while human rights experts are calling on the government to introduce a visa pathway for Palestinians fleeing Gaza – just as Australia has for those escaping other conflicts.
‘They are entitled to nothing’
Salma and her family fled from the north of Gaza in October after Israel’s military ordered Palestinians to evacuate to the south.
“We didn’t take anything … even clothes for prayer,” she says. “We just left.”
People who stayed in the north shared photos of her family’s houses burnt and destroyed. But the south was also unsafe, and the family continued to Rafah, close to the Egyptian border, until Salma was able to leave with her daughter on 28 December.
Her parents, siblings and their families remain in Rafah – a “very, very bad situation”, Salma says.
She wants to start working to earn money “to help bring my family here to feel safe like me, to help my dad”. But to do that, she first needs the means to survive.
Violet Roumeliotis, the chief executive of community-based Settlement Services International, says about 200 Palestinians have arrived in New South Wales on visitor visas from Gaza since the conflict started. While they wait 12 months to apply for bridging visas, “they are entitled to nothing”.
Sanmati Verma, the managing lawyer at Human Rights Law Centre, says the Albanese government has “failed to open humanitarian pathways from Gaza” by establishing a specific visa – and, at the same time, Palestinians have not received help with settlement or legal support after arriving in Australia.
“This is in marked distinction to the support that is rightly extended to the survivors of war and devastation in other parts of the [world], including Ukraine,” Verma says.
In the first five months of Russia’s war on Ukraine, 11,500 Ukrainian arrivals to Australia had access to a three-year humanitarian visa granting Medicare, work and study rights. On 31 July 2022 the Albanese government closed the scheme.
Afghan evacuees and Ukrainian arrivals were also eligible for the humanitarian support program, funded by the Department of Home Affairs, to help them integrate into Australian life. This gave access to orientation services, English language lessons, temporary housing assistance and legal services.
Nina Field, the manager of humanitarian services at the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, says a special visa category should be opened for Palestinians as soon as possible – “just as has been the situation with any other significant conflict”. In the meantime, Roumeliotis hopes an emergency support package will be announced.
Both Verma and Randa Kattan, the chief executive of the Arab Council Australia, are concerned that the government’s lack of visas for Palestinians is a political decision.
“Keeping people alive is way beyond politics, as far as I’m concerned,” Kattan says.
The Department of Home Affairs did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The immigration minister, Andrew Giles, and the home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, were also contacted for comment.
An uncertain future
Since the start of January, Salma and her daughter have been hosted by a woman who volunteered to provide three months of accommodation. As the end of those three months nears, they don’t know where to go.
Without support services or quick pathways off visitor visas, arrivals like Salma are “totally dependent” on the support of community groups, Roumeliotis says.
SSI is fundraising and drawing on its own resources to deliver support to 33 families in NSW, including providing Opal cards for travel and vouchers for food. In Melbourne the ASRC is doing the same for about 20 families.
But more than five months after the conflict started, the ability of the community to absorb the needs of arrivals is running out.
“We have an obligation but it is not sustainable,” Roumeliotis says. “This is a huge issue.”
Locals are volunteering to host Palestinian arrivals but “they can be sponsoring families of four or five in a two-bedroom unit with one bathroom” that still has to fit their own family, she says.
“Basic things” like a food budget, when catering for so many, “is putting a lot of pressure financially and emotionally on these families”.
“We are hearing stories [of] people sleeping in cars in people’s garages. There is a lot of generosity and good will, but the practicalities of these crammed, [insubstantial] conditions are causing a lot of challenges.”
The Arab Council of Australia has been receiving calls from people in the community, offering to assist however they can, Kattan says. The council has held events to fundraise for supplies but “there are particular areas that are beyond us”.
“Right now [there is] a lot of stress around housing, a lot of stress around what is next.”
‘Where are the open arms of welcome?’
Every day in Australia for Salma involves looking to SSI for help.
“I am very sad,” she says. “Even now, with Ramadan, we are fasting, but I am thinking how can I afford the money for food?
“I can’t feel the celebration of Ramadan like before. I am very worried about my family. Are they eating? Do they have food or not?”
Kattan says Palestinians arriving in Australia have experienced trauma.
“They have seen the horrors of war at a scale that nobody is seeing,” she says.
“They have seen animals eating corpses … You don’t know whether you will come out alive, whether your family members are going to see another minute. Imagine that, 24/7.”
The lack of access to necessary supports in Australia “makes that adjustment more painful”, Field says.
“Where are the open arms of welcome for the Palestinians arriving from this kind of horrendous conflict? They are not feeling safe, secure and supported.
“It is a time where you want to extend a hand to people, and help them adjust,” she says. “It is not a time where you want to make it as difficult as possible.”
*Salma is a pseudonym for her safety
