Kareem’s father was furious when he heard the rumors circulating in Ramallah about the sexuality of his 22-year-old son. “My dad aimed his gun towards me,” Kareem recalled, “and said that if he ever finds out that I’m gay, he would ‘rest a bullet between my eyes.’”
Kareem, whose name has been changed to protect his safety, had lived in the close-knit West Bank city for years, but he’d long known he would one day need to leave. It was March 2024, and the Tel Aviv Court for Administrative Affairs had recently ruled that LGBTQ+ Palestinians can petition for asylum in Israel — upending years of precedent that considered them ineligible. The following month, Kareem crossed into Israel, a country that has occupied the West Bank for more than twice as long as he’d been alive.
Supporters of Israel have long pointed to the “only democracy in the Middle East” as a purported safe haven for the LGBTQ+ community. While detractors say the argument amounts to “pinkwashing,” the use of LGBTQ+ inclusion to distract from moral and legal violations in other spheres, the Israeli government has doubled down on the concept, invoking it often to distract from violations of international law. In a speech before the United States Congress on July 24, 2024, for example, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mocked protesters holding “Gays for Gaza” signs, saying they “might as well hold up signs saying ‘Chickens for KFC.’”
As Netanyahu spoke, Kareem was living legally in Israel, believing his status secure while an administrative storm was brewing behind the scenes. Palestinians like Kareem might be safer by virtue of the distance from their families, but the bureaucratic process of seeking asylum imposes its own dangers. In interviews with The Intercept, Kareem and multiple advocates and lawyers for Palestinian asylum-seekers described how Israeli authorities put asylum-seekers through permit revocations, instability, and, in many cases, coerce them into sharing information with Israel’s internal intelligence agency.
Kareem felt this pressure, he told The Intercept.
At a processing facility at Sha’ar Ephraim, a crossing point in the separation wall west of Tulkarm in the northern West Bank, Kareem recalled, Israeli authorities repeatedly pressed him for information on friends and family still living in the West Bank, anything that might be of use. The implication was a quid pro quo: intelligence in exchange for an easier permit approval process.
“When you are in such a fragile situation, you cannot be in the territories [the West Bank], and you don’t have status in Israel, the security bodies like the police … use this weakness and they try to get information or get someone’s cooperation from those people,” Kareem’s attorney, Tamir Blank, told The Intercept. “They promise them that they will not deport them or put them in jail.”
Kareem didn’t have the kind of information necessary to secure such a process. He found himself, like so many Palestinian asylum-seekers in Israel, in a series of cascading double binds. After they flee, they find themselves trapped: Leaving the West Bank for Israel carries with it the stigma, true or not, of having collaborated with Israeli authorities, making it even more difficult to return, and leaving nowhere else to go.
Home to about 30,000 Palestinians, Ramallah is small and insular, but it contains a space for queer Palestinians to hold conversations that aren’t always possible elsewhere in the West Bank. A loose network of activists hosts weekly community meetings that range from knitting circles to conversations dissecting the Eurocentricity of LGBTQ+ identity terminology in Arabic. During Ramadan this year, as rockets flew overhead during the Israel–U.S. war on Iran, they hosted a queer iftar in the city.
Kareem was active with the group for a year before rumors made their way to his parents. They had long suspected “there was something off with me,” Kareem recalled.
It also did not help that the family, as is typical of Ramallah’s upper class, is conservative and politically involved.
His father works for the Palestinian Authority, just as his father before him, who was involved with the Palestine Liberation Organization before the 1993 Oslo Accords. The family home in Al-Bireh is an old stone building, “colder inside in the winter than it is outside,” according to Kareem, and adorned with a classic Palestinian metal gate.
Aside from occasional Israeli military raids, Al-Bireh feels like the only true bubble inside of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. There are upscale cafes, flower shops, and a concerted effort by all who live there to pretend they enjoy more freedom than they do. Despite the idyllic atmosphere, there are only a handful of checkpoints by which to exit the city, all manned by Israeli soldiers.
Kareem worked in his cousin’s welding shop in the Jalazone refugee camp, where, as he would later recount to Israeli authorities, he faced years of abuse — both sexual and physical — from his cousins, who taunted him for his feminine presentation. After Kareem’s father confronted him, he recalled, “My father was sending my cousins after me to stalk my friends and me.”
At first, Kareem thought he should flee to a different city in the West Bank, possibly Bethlehem. Israel had stopped issuing permits for most West Bank Palestinians after October 7, citing “security concerns,” and Kareem worried that his family’s associations with the Palestinian Authority would count against him. But the West Bank is small, so small that without checkpoints blocking the way, one could drive from Jenin at the top of the West Bank to Hebron at the bottom in about an hour and a half. As the crow flies, it is only 22 kilometers from Ramallah to Bethlehem. Families know each other, and word spreads fast.
So Kareem tried to fashion a life for himself in Israel. Not only would his family follow him to Israel after he fled, but so too would Israel’s occupation. His life would turn into a series of military court hearings and attempts to solicit intelligence from him by Shin Bet, Israeli domestic intelligence, with the specter of returning home meaning likely death.
Kareem secured a welfare permit by April 2024 with the help of pro bono lawyers from HIAS, a Jewish humanitarian organization that provides legal support to asylum-seekers in Israel, including a small number of Palestinians fleeing persecution. He spent months sleeping on benches and couch surfing before finally moving into an emergency LGBTQ+ youth shelter in Tel Aviv called HaGag HaVarod (“The Pink Roof” in Hebrew), where he went from never having met an Israeli who wasn’t holding a rifle to living together in shared housing.
“I was so confused. They had just given me the permit, so why would they take it away?”
In October 2024, just six months after leaving the West Bank, Kareem woke up to an alert on his phone that his permit to stay in Israel had been invalidated. His lawyers advised him to leave the shelter immediately. It was operated under the Israeli Ministry of Welfare, putting him at risk of deportation without a permit.
“I was so confused. They had just given me the permit, so why would they take it away?” Kareem recounted.
His family appeared to have worked to sabotage his legal status through multiple channels. In June, they had filed a report with Israeli social services claiming Kareem was a Hamas member planning to attack civilians. When a security flag appeared in his file, triggering the revocation of his welfare permit, his lawyers raised the possibility in court that it too had been planted by his family to engineer his deportation. The Intercept attempted to reach Kareem’s father for comment but was unable to get in touch.
“I had a security block on my application,” Kareem said. “There was no way to get it back without petitioning the military commander for reconsideration.”
Nimrod Avigal, deputy director of HIAS Israel, has been tracking LGBTQ+ Palestinian asylum claims for more than a decade. He worked on Kareem’s case at the outset. “Everything became much more difficult after October 7,” he said. “Many more people were refused because of security issues, mostly related to a family member.”
Back in his hometown, rumors were circulating that Kareem was collaborating with Israeli authorities, according to testimony submitted to the Jerusalem District Court, a justification not only for his family to track him down, but also for others to help them.
His family began posting notices in Facebook groups offering a cash reward for any information leading to his whereabouts, declaring him a “missing person.” One such post appeared in a public Jerusalem Facebook group with more than 450,000 members.
His phone was flooded with calls, 60 to 80 a day, mostly from unknown numbers. Eventually, as Kareem recounted to The Intercept, he threw his phone into the Mediterranean Sea in the hopes it would solve the problem.
It did not. The family hired men in Ramallah to track Kareem down on the other side of the separation wall. “They said that they were hired by my family to look for me and bring me back ‘after I tarnished the family’s reputation,’” Kareem recalled, “and that they need to ‘wash their honor as soon as possible.’”
A childhood friend now living in Spain sent Kareem a voice memo with a warning: “Your family has placed a bounty of 35,000 shekels on your head. It is absolutely clear that this will not end well and that your family is truly determined to catch you.”
The only thing standing between Kareem and deportation back to the West Bank was his welfare permit, and now it was gone.
In a court filing, Kareem’s attorney wrote that his family members wished “to obtain information about his whereabouts and bring him to the territories, dead or alive, in order to settle accounts with him, that is, to ensure he does not remain alive.”
Israel contended in court that Palestinians in Kareem’s position were motivated not by genuine fear but by a desire to “enjoy the more liberal lifestyle in Israel, rather than facing an actual threat,” language drawn from a 2013 Israeli Inter-Ministerial Committee report on Palestinians claiming persecution based on sexual orientation.
Israel contended that queer Palestinians were motivated by a desire to “enjoy the more liberal lifestyle in Israel, rather than facing an actual threat.”
In response to a request for comment from The Intercept, COGAT, the Israeli military body that oversees civilian affairs in the occupied territories, said that permits of this kind are granted “first and foremost for the purpose of saving lives, and allow the applicant to remain in Israel until a permanent solution is found in a receiving country.”
As Kareem’s lawyers and other human rights organizations in Israel have long argued, rather than being welcomed, gay Palestinians are frequently subject to blackmail by Israeli authorities, who pressure them to provide intelligence in exchange for protection, turning their vulnerability into a tool of coercion.
In the 10 Years Tamir Blank has been working with Palestinians from the West Bank filing asylum claims in Israel, he has accepted that many of his clients will either willingly choose to collaborate with Israeli intelligence or be coerced into it.
Many asylum-seekers feel pressured to offer intelligence to Israeli authorities in the hope that it might help them obtain a humanitarian stay permit, which entitles them to the right to work. (Even that is a relatively recent development: The permits only began allowing legal employment in 2022, after extensive litigation, before which Palestinians were often forced into grey industries like the sex trade.) In one case, a transgender Palestinian woman named Zehava who fled the West Bank in 2021 died by suicide after Israeli authorities revoked her permit.
“The Israeli policy is to minimize the presence of Palestinians within its borders, in the West Bank and within the 48 borders,” referring to Israel’s pre-1967 territory, said Anat Matar, an Israeli academic and head of the Israeli Committee for Palestinian Prisoners. Israeli authorities deter Palestinians from fleeing to Israel with bureaucratic hurdles, she told The Intercept, as they seek to maintain a Jewish demographic majority.
Blank’s clients are often so desperate to hold onto their status, feeling pressured to offer intelligence is “not something that is unique,” he said. The authorities “use every weakness they can.”
Kareem, however, was out of luck. He had no such intelligence to offer, as is often the case with LGBTQ+ Palestinians forced to flee. According to Blank, the very fact of their social exclusion means they are rarely privy to intelligence of value to Israeli authorities, regardless of who their family members might be.
Because he was born in the West Bank and holds a Palestinian Authority-issued ID, Kareem is unable to ever obtain residency or citizenship in Israel. Doing so, Israeli authorities fear, would set a precedent for a broader right of return for Palestinians displaced in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The original welfare permit Israel issued required Kareem to pursue resettlement in a third country; there was no path for him to remain in Israel.
Reut Ahdut, of the Aguda Israel, which until 2025 ran a program offering assistance to LGBTQ+ Palestinians fleeing the West Bank, said permits that used to be relatively stable are now often granted for only one to three months, with applicants required to regularly provide evidence that they are at risk across all Palestinian Authority territories, including the West Bank.
Despite the 2024 ruling, Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority maintains that Palestinians are not subject to the United Nations Refugee Convention and therefore that it is not obligated to provide them asylum on the grounds that UNRWA, the U.N. agency mandated to provide assistance to Palestinian refugees, bears that responsibility instead. After banning UNRWA from operating on its territory in 2025, Israel demolished UNRWA’s East Jerusalem headquarters in January.
After a court battle at the Jerusalem District Court, Kareem’s permit was reinstated in December 2024, and he has since been able to renew it with the permission of the military commander. In its ruling, the court acknowledged that the security intelligence used to revoke his permit may have been “based on false allegations that his family has made against him, in order to bring about his deportation.”
For now, Kareem has no path out of Israel — his life suspended, renewed six months at a time.
At one point, Kareem hoped he could be resettled to Canada through the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees resettlement program, but amid rising anti-immigrant sentiment even in Canada, that option has vanished.
His time living in the shelter is over. With the help of the Tel Aviv Municipality, Kareem has moved into transitional housing in the Tel Aviv area.
He keeps his lightheartedness, switching seamlessly from referencing TikToks he found hilarious, to drama at work, to decrying how life as a Palestinian in Israel has become all but impossible since October 7th.
With the Port of Jaffa to the left and the Tel Aviv skyline looming off to the right, Kareem stared out at the Mediterranean, reflecting on the past year.
“I hate the sea, I really do, and I am supposed to say at least I got to see it because of my permit. But really what I miss is my home, the West Bank,” Kareem said. “That is where I am from, but for now, the sea will do.”
