Following petition filed by Gisha, Israel grants a grandmother from Gaza a permit to attend her granddaughter’s wedding in Israel after demanding proof that she was really in the Strip
July 3, 2019. The petitioner is a 62-year-old woman living in the Gaza Strip. Three of her daughters live in Israel with their families. Ahead of her granddaughter’s wedding, the petitioner applied for a permit to enter Israel. As required by Israeli authorities for all permit applications by Gaza residents, the petitioner submitted her application via the Palestinian Civil Affairs Committee in Gaza (PCAC), attaching a copy of her ID card and an invitation to the wedding. Gisha forwarded Israeli authorities a copy of the application with the supporting documents. Two weeks later, the Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration (CLA), the Israeli military unit charged with processing permit applications by Gaza residents, responded that the documents she had submitted were not in order, and that, therefore, her application was denied. No explanation was given as to why the documents were not in order and what was wrong with them. Attempts to receive clarification over the phone proved fruitless.
Given the circumstances, Gisha was compelled to file a petition (Hebrew) on behalf of the grandmother, arguing that in denying her application arbitrarily without explaining the flaws it had found in the supporting documents, the state had breached its duty of fairness.
In its response (Hebrew), the state divulged, for the first time, that the flaw in the documents was that they were illegible. No reason was offered as to why the petitioner had not been told that the issue was one of form rather than content, or why she had not been instructed to simply resubmit the documents. The state further argued that the grandmother had submitted her permit application too late, only a month before the date of the wedding, rather than the full 50 business days required by the CLA’s directives.
Despite its claim regarding the supposed delay in submitting the application, and its position that the petition should be dismissed, the state noted in its response that the petitioner’s application would be considered providing she resubmitted the documents in question via the Palestinian Civil Affairs Committee. The state insisted that these documents be submitted again to the PCAC offices in Gaza City, despite the fact that a clear and legible version of the documents had been attached as exhibits to the petition, and had previously been emailed to the CLA’s offices by Gisha.
The petitioner, who feared she would miss her granddaughter’s wedding if she did not comply with the respondents’ demands, returned to the PCAC with the documents. After she had resubmitted then, the counsel for the state, Adv. Yafit Berkovich, informed Gisha that according to Israel’s records, the petitioner was not, in fact, in the Gaza Strip but rather, was staying in Israel “illegally,” and, therefore, she would not be issued a permit even though legible documents had indeed been received. The state’s counsel demanded that the petitioner return to the PCAC and have her photo taken with an employee of the committee, to prove she really was in the Strip, as she claimed.
On July 8, 2019, after the respondents received the photo of the petitioner with a PCAC staff member, her application was approved and she was able to attend her granddaughter’s wedding in Israel.
