The United States has announced that it is halting all visitor visas for people from Gaza pending a “a full and thorough” review, a day after social media posts about Palestinian refugees prompted furious reactions from right-wingers.
The Department of State’s move on Saturday came a day after far-right activist and Trump ally Laura Loomer posted on X that Palestinians “who claim to be refugees from Gaza” entered the US via San Francisco and Houston this month.
“How is allowing for Islamic immigrants to come into the US America First policy?” she said on X in a later post, going on to report further Palestinian arrivals in Missouri and claiming that “several US Senators and members of Congress” had texted her to express their fury.
Republican lawmakers speaking publicly included Chip Roy of Texas, who said he would inquire about the matter, and Randy Fine of Florida, who described the alleged arrivals as a “national security risk”.
By Saturday, the State Department announced it was stopping visas for “individuals from Gaza” while it conducted “a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days”. It did not provide a figure.
The US issued 640 visas to holders of the Palestinian Authority travel document in May, according to the Reuters news agency. B1/B2 visitor visas permit Palestinians to seek medical treatment in the US.
‘Dangerous and inhumane decision’
Aid groups have urged the US to reverse its “dangerous and inhumane decision”.
The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF) said the new restrictions will prevent children in urgent need of medical treatment from travelling to the US.
“This will have a devastating and irreversible impact on our ability to bring injured and critically ill children from Gaza to the US for lifesaving medical treatment,” the group warned.
Tareq Hailat, director of Global Patient Affairs at the PCRF, urged Washington to reverse its decision. “This is extremely devastating news,” he told Al Jazeera. “The impact of this decision will be devastating. And the US must honestly reverse this decision immediately.”
Hailat stressed that denying medical visas strips Gaza’s children of their “most basic human rights”.
HEAL Palestine, which coordinates evacuations for injured children and their families to the US, said it has assisted 148 people so far, among them 63 children in need of urgent care.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an advocacy group, has also slammed the US State Department’s decision to stop issuing visas to Palestinians from Gaza.
“Blocking Palestinian children injured by American weapons from coming to America for medical treatment is the latest sign that the intentional cruelty of President Trump’s ‘Israel First’ administration knows no bounds,” the group said in a statement on X.
“It is also deeply ironic that the Trump administration would ban Palestinian children seeking treatment while rolling out the red carpet for racists and indicted war criminals from the Israeli government. This ban is just the latest example of our government’s complicity with Israel’s genocide, which is increasingly rejected by the American people,” it added.
Tamer Qarmout, Associate Professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, said the United States has “lost its soul” in the Gaza war through its unwavering support for Israel.
Speaking to Al Jazeera from Doha, he argued that Washington should suspend arms deliveries to Israel if it wants to end what he described as “genocide.”
Loomer, the far-right activist, greeted Saturday’s State Department announcement with glee.
“It’s amazing how fast we can get results from the Trump administration,” she said on Saturday, though she later posted that more needed to be done to “highlight the crisis of the invasion happening in our country”.
The decision to cut visas comes as Israel intensifies its attacks on Gaza, where at least 61,827 people have been killed in the past 22 months, with the United Nations warning that “widespread starvation, malnutrition and disease” are driving a rise in famine-related deaths.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pushing to seize Gaza City as part of a takeover of the Strip, forcibly displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to concentration zones.
