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Monday, May 24, 2010

200 Palestinian Arabs stranded in Kish, Iran

Ma'an Arabic reports about an interesting situation between the Iranian tourist island of Kish and the UAE.

It seems that a couple of hundred Palestinian Arabs, independently, managed to get out of Gaza in search of jobs elsewhere in the Arab world. These people managed to get to the United Arab Emirates on tourist visas, and then to gain employment contracts in the UAE. However, they were not allowed to work on their visas, and were told to leave the UAE and then return as workers.

They couldn't go back to Gaza, and the person interviewed said that he couldn't go back to Egypt where he attended university, so they instead went to the closest country they could - Iran. They checked into some of the hotels in the tourist island of Kish.

Then, when they tried to return to go back to the UAE, the officials there refused to take them in for security reasons.

The Ma'an article says that these security reasons are because they are Palestinian, not because they are coming from Iran (the UAE and Iran have some disputes over other islands in the Gulf.)

Now they can't pay their hotel bills, they don't have food, the Palestinian embassy in the UAE is not helping them, and they have nowhere to go.