LONDON: A Palestinian woman who died of cancer in Gaza last month had been seeking to travel to the UK with her husband and children after a Home Office visa application was rejected, according to her family. Anwar, a Gaza refugee living in Glasgow, said his sister-in-law Maryam could still be alive if British authorities had allowed her and her family to travel to the UK when they first applied, The Guardian reported on Saturday. Anwar fled Gaza in 2020 and was granted refugee status in Britain the following year. After the outbreak of the war in Gaza in October 2023, he applied in October 2025 to bring his brother Hassan, Maryam and their two young children to the UK. The application was complicated by the requirement for applicants to provide biometric information at a visa application center. There is no such center in Gaza, while Palestinians face severe difficulties leaving the territory to access facilities elsewhere. In April, the family asked the Home Office to waive the biometric requirement and allow their applications to undergo “predetermination” and “biometric excusal.” The request was rejected, prompting the family to launch a legal challenge. The Home Office agreed to reconsider the decision but rejected the request again in July. By then, Maryam’s condition had deteriorated significantly. Shortly after giving birth to her son Ismail, now seven months old, she was diagnosed with renal cell carcinoma that had spread to her lungs. Doctors in Gaza told the family that the territory lacked the facilities needed to treat her. The family submitted medical evidence, including cancer test results and referral reports, as well as information about their living conditions, including sleeping in tents and shortages of food, medicine and clean water. The Home Office accepted the evidence that Maryam had cancer and acknowledged the difficulties facing the family. In a letter dated July 31, officials said: “Given the current situation in Gaza, reliable healthcare may not be accessible.” They also accepted that Maryam faced a significant risk of harm because she was in a conflict zone and unable to travel to a visa application center. However, officials concluded that, despite the circumstances being “somewhat compelling,” it was in the children’s best interests to remain with their parents in Gaza and delay travel to the UK. They said the family’s circumstances did not meet the threshold for “compelling circumstances” required to waive the biometric requirement. They also said pre-entry checks remained necessary because the family came from “a territory where terrorists operate.” The family’s lawyers argued that it was “difficult to understand what circumstances would ever qualify as compelling if the present circumstances do not.” Maryam died from cancer on Aug. 28. Gordon McKee, the Labour MP for Glasgow South, had raised the case with ministers in June, warning about Maryam’s deteriorating health and the collapse of reliable healthcare in Gaza. In a letter to Mike Tapp, then a Home Office minister, McKee described the case as involving “exceptional humanitarian circumstances” and asked him to personally review it. Anwar said Maryam’s case raised wider questions about how Britain handles family reunification applications from Palestinians trapped in Gaza. “I believe that if the Home Office had agreed to bring Maryam and her family from Gaza to the UK when we first applied last October, Maryam would still be alive today,” he said. “Maryam is now gone, but her family remains in Gaza. We are now urgently asking the UK government to intervene to protect Maryam’s surviving family members and to find a way to bring them to safety and reunite them with their family in the UK.” Speaking from Gaza, Maryam’s husband Hassan described the loss of his wife while remaining in the territory with their children. “I am struggling to come to terms with losing my wife while I remain trapped in Gaza with our children, including our seven-month-old baby,” he said. He said the family had spent Maryam’s illness trying to overcome the biometric requirement and progress their applications. “The Home Office accepted that Maryam had cancer and acknowledged the evidence, but decided that our circumstances were still not compelling enough to justify biometric deferral or predetermination,” Hassan said. “Now I have lost my wife, and I am left trying to protect our children and find a way to get them out of Gaza and to safety.” Home Office sources said they did not routinely comment on individual cases.