LONDON: A Palestinian grandmother who fled the war in Gaza has been detained in Australia by immigration officers after they raided her son’s home in Sydney.
Maha Almassri, 61, was taken away in a pre-dawn raid on Thursday by 15 members of the Australian Border Force, her family said.
She was told her visa has been canceled after she failed a character test, Guardian Australia reported.
Almassri left Gaza via the Rafah border crossing with Egypt in February 2024 and arrived in Australia, where many of her family live, on a tourist visa soon afterwards, her cousin Mohammed Almassri said.
She had been staying with her son in western Sydney, where the raid took place at 5.30 a.m. She was taken to a nearby police station and transferred to Villawood detention center, Mohammed told the Guardian.
Her visa was canceled by the assistant minister for citizenship and cultural affairs Julian Hill, who “reasonably suspects that the person does not pass the character test” and was “satisfied that the cancelation was in the national interest,” a document seen by the newspaper and SBS News said.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organization assessed Almassri to be “directly or indirectly a risk to security,” it said.
Mohammed said that his cousin was in poor health, frightened, and struggled to talk over the phone because she was so upset.
He said that the Australian and Israeli authorities carried out security checks before she was cleared to leave Gaza, where almost 58,000 people have been killed in a 21-month Israeli onslaught.
“She’s an old lady, what can she do?” Mohammed said. “What’s the reason? They have to let us know why this has happened. There is no country, no house, nothing (to go back to in Gaza).”
A spokesperson for Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke told SBS News that the government would not comment on the case.
“Any information in the public domain is being supplied by the individual and is not necessarily consistent with the information supplied by our intelligence and security agencies,” the spokesperson said.
Almassri had reportedly been granted a bridging visa in June last year after applying for a protection visa.
Last year, Amnesty International accused Australia of rejecting more than 7,000 Palestinian visa applications since the Israeli offensive on Gaza started in 2023.
