UK Reopens Resettlement Scheme, but Only for Palestinians Who Reach Jordan or Lebanon
Palestinian refugees will be eligible for the UK's reopened resettlement scheme only if they have already reached Jordan or Lebanon.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced the reopening at Labour's annual conference in September 2026. The Home Office said around one in four referrals under the reopened scheme will be for Afghan women and girls and Palestinian refugees fleeing war and persecution, according to The Guardian. The government set out the plan in a gov.uk press release titled 'UK Resettlement Scheme reopens for new referrals'.
A resettlement scheme is a government program that selects refugees who are living outside their home country and brings them to the UK. The scope here is limited. Referrals for Palestinians will be handled by the International Refugee Assistance Project (Irap), a legal aid group. Irap confirmed it would only refer "a very small number of extremely urgent" cases, all of which would be processed in Jordan and Lebanon.
The Home Office said the scheme has always been for people from outside their country of origin, meaning outside the place they fled. Palestinians who remain in Gaza would not initially be included, but Palestinians who have fled Gaza could be referred to the UK through Irap.
That location rule was not clear in the first announcement. Communities for Palestinians said the limit to Jordan and Lebanon was not in Mahmood's conference speech or later Home Office statements. Vicky Moller is a co-founder of Communities for Palestinians.
In practice, humanitarian groups in Jordan and Lebanon will send cases to Irap. Irap will then hold interviews to decide if cases can be sent to the UK government. The program focuses on extremely vulnerable refugees whose lives have become unsustainable in Jordan or Lebanon. Numbers are not set. Irap said it does not know how many people the UK government will accept, which depends on funding and local authorities having space for new arrivals.
This means leaving Gaza must happen before a person can be considered. The Rafah crossing is the sole route in or out for nearly all of Gaza's more than 2 million inhabitants, and it has been shut for most of the war, Reuters reported. Jordan is home to some 2 million registered Palestinian refugees, most of whom have Jordanian citizenship. The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office advises against all travel to parts of Palestine. A separate route through the courts is still possible after a Palestinian family stuck in Gaza despite having permission to join a relative in Britain was given a lifeline by a court to come to Britain.
The broader context here is the system of third-country resettlement, where refugees are chosen after they have left a conflict area. London is describing the scheme as an orderly pathway like the UN refugee agency model, not an evacuation or family reunion from inside Gaza. That places legal and practical pressure on nearby states and aid groups, while UK numbers depend on domestic factors, mainly funding and council capacity. Practitioners will be watching whether a caseload defined this tightly can work when exit is so constrained, and whether court rulings or political pressure widen the scope over time.
