OPENING THE BLACK BOX

“Our academic aspirations are within sight, and we wish to contribute to the world through our studies. With the goodwill and empathy of Canada, our future will not slip away needlessly due to factors beyond our control.”

This sentiment from Majd, a Palestinian student in Gaza who was accepted to a master’s program in Computer Science at McGill, is not an isolated one; it reflects the circumstances of 68 Palestinian students who are admitted to graduate programs at Canada’s top universities—including McGill University, University of Toronto, and University of Calgary—but are barred from travelling to Canada to study. Their obstacles are not academic; rather, these students' hands have been tied by a web of targeted and restrictive immigration barriers.

Most of these students, like Majd, are stuck in Gaza, where daily life is marked by instability, restricted mobility, and unreliable internet and electricity due to Israel’s continued genocide. Even those who have managed to evacuate the Gaza Strip are still trapped by the selective negligence of immigration bureaucracies.

Despite their unconscionable circumstances, many of the graduate students in Gaza continue their academic programs remotely while awaiting study permit approvals from the Canadian government. Tragically, some never received that chance. Sally and Dalia Ghazi Ibaid, twin sisters accepted into a PhD program at the University of Waterloo, were killed in an Israeli airstrike on Dec. 5, 2024, while preparing to cross the Rafah border into Egypt.

Their deaths serve as a devastating reminder of the lives lost when bureaucratic systems tailor their efficiency to a colonial valuation of human life. Such valuation justifies the abandonment of Palestinian students while alleviating accountability from the Canadian institutions and governments perpetrating it.

This feature examines how Canadian immigration bureaucracies block Palestinian students’ passage to Canada through selective application processing, indeterminate timelines, and impossible requirements, trapping students from Gaza in a ‘Black Box’ of restriction, uncertainty, and life-threatening physical danger.

Requirements for obtaining an international study permit to Canada are the same whether an individual is from France, the United States, or Gaza. Palestinian students, like any others hoping to study abroad, must provide proof of acceptance into a Canadian institution, evidence of financial support, valid travel documents, and biometric data. After submission, applications undergo security screening and background checks before receiving official approval.

While standardized requirements for a study permit make sense in theory, those applying from within Gaza face unparalleled obstacles from Israel’s ongoing violence, forced displacements, border closures, and demolition of infrastructure in the Strip. As a result, many are unable to even complete their applications, while those who can are kept in limbo by long delays—often without explanation.

In August 2025, the Canadian government introduced Special Immigration Measures for Palestinians, effective until July 31, 2026. These measures are intended to support Palestinians already in Canada through fee-exempt study and work permits, extensions of temporary resident status, and expedited processing in some cases. But these measures do not extend to Palestinians currently inside Gaza. Biometric requirements, exit procedures from Gaza, and security screenings still apply to these students, with no adjustments tailored to the context of the ongoing genocide, famine, and destruction in the Strip.

The impossible procedural barrier for Palestinian students from Gaza is the biometric requirement. Applicants must provide fingerprints and photos obtained at a Visa Application Centre (VAC). However, no VAC exists in Gaza, and the only available centre is in Cairo, Egypt—requiring passage through the Rafah Border Crossing. Since May 2024, Israel has seized control of Rafah and closed the crossing with Egypt—and is not likely to reopen it. Even before the closure, reaching Rafah was risky and time-consuming. Now, with the crossing shut and the surrounding areas frequently under fire, it is effectively impossible for most students to leave.

In May 2024, Canada’s then-Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, Marc Miller, told the House of Commons that Palestinian students could complete their biometrics in Egypt, Jordan, or Israel. However, this statement disregards the current political and physical reality of Gaza—where Israel has destroyed crossings, bombed airports, and sealed off borders—making travel to any of these countries impossible. Miller’s remarks not only displayed an ignorance of Gaza’s humanitarian crisis, but also revealed a bureaucratic cruelty in suggesting “solutions” that are geographically and logistically unattainable.

While applicants and advocates have demanded waivers or deferrals for Gazan students’ biometrics given the exceptional circumstances, Canada has ignored these requests.

But biometrics are not the whole story. Even those students who successfully left Gaza and completed all application requirements, including biometrics, have now waited more than a year in the background check phase. This stage, managed by unnamed ‘third-party organizations,’ adheres to no official timeline or any precedent of direct communication with applicants. Through interviews we learned that others were barred from paying for various stages of the process because Palestinian visa cards were not accepted. Some were even prevented from starting the application process after submitting their ‘interest forms’ and never receiving the reference code needed to complete the application.

Students and advocates describe this obscure knot of bureaucratic obstacles as a ‘Black Box’—a term reflecting the lack of transparency and accountability surrounding study permit applications for Palestinians.

“It’s a Black Box. It’s unknown what is causing the block to their study permits,” said Nadia Abu-Zahra in an interview with The Tribune.

Abu-Zahra is a professor at the University of Ottawa and an active collaborator with the Palestinian Students and Scholars at Risk (PSSAR) network. PSSAR supports students through the university, student visa, and CAQ application processes, helps them access social services, and pairs accepted students with professors to supervise research.

“These innocent students are waiting, and the only thing they want to do is to be able to study,” Abu-Zahra said. “It’s unfair to block them now [for] no reason. No one knows why they’re being blocked. No one has given a reason as to why they are being blocked.”

Nada El-Fassou, the Director of Student Services at PSSAR, echoed this frustration in an interview with The Tribune.

“Whenever we ask questions about [the processing delays], IRCC [Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada] just says it’s done by third-party organizations,” El-Fassou said. “We don’t know what they do. They refuse to tell us what they do. They refuse to tell us who the third-party organizations are. And every time we ask for help—even from MPs [Members of Parliament]—they say the same thing: ‘There’s no processing time.’”

While IRCC is a major cog in the immigration restriction machine, it does not act alone. The Black Box is held together not by isolated bureaucratic inefficiencies, but by broader political apathy.

“If the Prime Minister’s Office decided to create a new process that works for these students, they could have done that a long time ago,” said El-Fassou. “So I believe it’s a shared responsibility between many different parts of the government.”

The discrepancy between Canada’s alleged commitment to high-quality international education and humanitarian support on one hand, and its neglect of Palestinian scholars on the other, puts in sharp relief the discrimination built into its apparently egalitarian path to international education. It is a path that systematically excludes those facing the harshest persecution, enabling the Canadian government to frame education as a right for most, but for Palestinians, a hard-won privilege.

These bureaucratic barriers translate to very real consequences for students trapped in Gaza. Many have been accepted to Canadian universities and received scholarships, but cannot reach their campuses or even complete their visa applications. Their stories reflect both the personal toll of waiting and the larger systemic forces keeping them in limbo.

For privacy and security reasons, The Tribune is not publishing the names of students. The accounts shared here are based on verified documentation and direct communication with Palestinian applicants and advocates.

One student, accepted to a master’s program at a Canadian university for Fall 2024, has been waiting for over a year for a study permit decision. “It’s not only about my education—it’s about safety,” they said. “Every day, I fear for my life, but I also fear that if I survive, I will lose my scholarship because of the delay.”

Another student, who had planned to study in Quebec, described how the violence and communication blackouts in Gaza have made it almost impossible to maintain contact with Canadian institutions. “There are days when we have no electricity for more than 20 hours,” they said. “I can’t even send an email to the university or contact my professors for guidance.”

Sherin has never been outside Gaza, and has lived her entire life under Israeli siege. For her, McGill is a key to personal mobility and cultural fluency. But it is also the place that can best provide her with the training in pediatric neuroscience necessary to address the psychological scarring and developmental trauma inflicted upon Palestinian children by Israel’s genocide and it man-made famine back in Gaza.

“The need for education is greater than ever,” Sherin said. “This isn't just about knowledge gained during a single academic year or our three academic years, it's about transferring the experience of a great nation like Canada back home.”

Sherin’s education is a medical resource. By denying it, Canada inflicts egregious violence against the hundreds of Palestinians still stuck in Gaza for whom Sherin’s degree could be the difference between life and death.

Just a few years ago, the Gaza Strip bustled with life: Gazans ate in restaurants, worked in offices, and attended university. But this vitality has been erased from dominant visual discourse—physically by Israel, symbolically by Western media, and legally by immigration bureaucracies. Pursuing education preserves a semblance of this denied normalcy.

“When you look at the current status of Gaza in the news, most are naturally astonished if such a place is fit to human life,” Sherin said. “They might view anyone arriving from Gaza as a form of permanent immigration, assuming they will never return [....] However, Gaza is fit for life, and our primary desire is to acquire Canadian expert[ise] and knowledge so we can return.”

She also described education as a form of resistance and reclamation in the face of the damage-centred colonial rendering of her home.

“For me, education currently is not just a resilience of resistance. It's a breath of life in this crisis,” Sherin said. “Many of my students have been killed just trying to reach the hospital for a lecture. But also studying makes them feel like they are now live [sic] normal life before the war.”

Functioning in this way as a token of memory, education is both a form of preservation and a tool of psychological reconstruction of the once-flourishing Gaza.

“Education stability is the cornerstone of stability,” Sherin told us. “It's the memory of stability. It's escape from death, and is sensed.”

The stability of education also comes from its indestructibility. As the Israeli state razes Palestinian homes, schools, aid sites, hospitals, libraries, museums, businesses, and houses of worship to the ground, education prevails as one of the few things of which Palestinians cannot be deprived.

One Palestinian doctoral student told Abu-Zahra that a doctorate is something no one can take away.

“He was comparing the doctorate and academic accomplishments to land, to homes, to agriculture, to the place [he] grew up, to [his] ancestors—everything that they're attached to,” Abu-Zahra recalled. “Palestinians, as a people dispossessed, seek academic qualifications because they recognize that that cannot be dispossessed, that cannot be expropriated.”

Canada has everything to gain from Palestinian students. They have been accepted to the most competitive programs around the country in medicinal chemistry, mathematical cryptography, biotechnology, and civil engineering, to name only a few. Their merit shines irrefutably even after every university that once fostered it has long been reduced to rubble.

“These students are very high-achieving,” El-Fassou said. “They would be amazing. They would contribute greatly to the Canadian academic community. And we're really missing out on that.”

“What gives me hope is knowing that this is not an impossible problem to solve,” Majd told us—and it’s true.

Universities hold the power of advocacy, and a collective influence greater than the sum of their parts. “Universities are like individuals,” Abu-Zahra said. “When they act individually, they have individual power. When they act collectively, they have collective power.” Support from organizations like PSSAR, testimony before Parliament, and acts of solidarity like the McGill Association of University Teachers (MAUT)’s historic resolution to boycott Israel, economize on this influence—and must continue to do so.

But the academy’s power is limited. It is the IRCC and the Canadian government that have the direct power to facilitate Palestinian students’ evacuation to third countries to obtain biometrics—as many other countries have already done. This year, the United Kingdom evacuated 34 Palestinian students, Ireland evacuated more than 60, and France evacuated over 100. “Their actions prove that with political will, a pathway can be created,” Majd said.

“I am very hopeful that the government will change,” El-Fassou told us, “because if they don't, we will be on the wrong side of history.”

The Canadian government has not been straight-jacketed into quiescence. Today, it could choose to welcome to its universities some of the finest scholars in the world, to foster expertise capable of saving lives, and to be part of the psychological reconstruction and infrastructure of hope for a place razed to the ground by an apartheid state. And if not today, it could choose again tomorrow.

“Without this kind of intervention,” Majd explained, “my application and my future at McGill remain in limbo, despite everything else I have done to make this happen.”

“Once [Palestinian students] get here, they can flourish and they can thrive,” Abu-Zahra said. “But they're starving at the moment. Two of the 70 people accepted into universities have been killed. I don't know if Canada's waiting for the other 68 to die or be killed.”

“We are not asking for the impossible,” Majd said. “We are asking for what has been shown to be possible.”