Dozens of MPs have told the prime minister it is “more urgent than ever” to create a Ukraine-style family visa for Gazans with family in the UK.

At the end of June, 67 MPs and peers wrote to Sir Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper, who was home secretary at the time, to create a “Gaza Family Scheme” to “reunite [Palestinians] with their loved ones in the UK until it is safe to return”.

They said it could be based on the Ukraine Family Scheme, which allowed Ukrainian nationals from 2022 to February 2024 to join family members in the UK to live, work and study for up to three years.

However, the group told Sky News they have not received a reply in the three months since their request, so Labour MP Marsha de Cordova, who coordinated the letter, has sent another letter to the prime minister and current Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, calling for an urgent update on whether the government will create a Gaza family visa scheme.

The new letter, seen exclusively by Sky News and sent on 1 October, said a scheme “is more urgent than ever” to “help the family members of British citizens and residents currently trapped in Gaza”.

It says 65,419 people are now reported to have been killed and 167,160 injured, while critical infrastructure has been destroyed and medics, rescue workers, teachers and journalists have been killed.

“British citizens and residents with family members in Gaza are understandably terrified that their relatives will be killed,” the letter says.

Israel has been engaging in a military takeover of Gaza City, and on Wednesday its defence minister, Israel Katz, said anyone who remains in the city will be “considered terrorists and terror supporters”.

On 1 September, the British government temporarily suspended new applications for a scheme allowing refugees to bring family members to the UK, which includes people from Gaza.

Ms de Cordova, a former shadow cabinet member, told Sky News: “We are now facing a genocide in Gaza – as concluded by the UN – with an ever-rising death toll, an unyielding manmade famine and family members of British citizens trapped in a war zone.

“That’s why I’ve written again to the government, pressing them to create a Gaza family visa scheme.

“A family visa scheme would give people a route out of Gaza, allow them to be reunited with family in the UK and give them the chance at a fresh start.

“Just last month, the government took the important measure of recognising Palestinian statehood. A family visa scheme would be a practical next step that would help bring people to safety and help us – as a nation – live up to our highest values on the global stage.”

Ghassan Ghaben, spokesman for the Gaza Families Reunited campaign, said the lack of a scheme “continues to tear Palestinian families apart”.

He said the suspension of the refugee family reunion route is a “devastating step backwards” as it was “one of the only safe routes left for spouses and children to join their immediate family members in the UK”.

“The UK government must uphold the right to family unity and allow Palestinians in the UK to reunite with their loved ones in Gaza,” Mr Ghaben said.

“More widely, it must urgently take concrete action to stop Israel’s continued starvation, displacement, and killing of Palestinians in Gaza.

“Recognising a Palestinian state without taking concrete steps to uphold Palestinian basic human rights, including family unity, is nothing short of hypocrisy.”

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The current wave of violence began on 7 October, 2023, when Hamas-led militants carried out an attack inside Israel that killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and saw around 250 people taken hostage.

Israel claims its operation in Gaza is aimed at pressuring Hamas to surrender and return the remaining 48 hostages – it believes around 20 of the captives are still alive.

Israel has repeatedly denied that its actions in Gaza amount to genocide and claims they are justified as a means of self-defence. It says it does not target civilians.

The number of people killed in Gaza, reported by the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, does not differentiate between civilians and fighters – but its officials say more than half of those killed are women and children.

Sky News has contacted Number 10 and the Home Office for a comment.

As we sat down to begin our annual conference interview shortly after the prime minister had delivered his speech to party members, I asked Sir Keir Starmer how he was feeling? “Good,” he said, “it was a speech I needed to give”.

He was right to feel buoyed. After 15 months of being battered about in government, with ever-worsening polls, open challenges to his leadership and endless private grumbling from within his own government, the PM answered his critics in a speech that showed both his emotion and intent as he pitted his vision of Britain against that of Nigel Farage.

It was a dividing line that united his party behind him as he set up the battle at the next election between Labour and Reform, between, in his words, “decency or division, renewal or decline”.

He also marched directly into societal wars with a rallying cry that was met with rapturous applause in the hall as he savaged racists who graffitied a Chinese takeaway and criticised people seeking to sow “fear and discord across our country”.

This was a PM that found his voice and identified his enemy in Farage as he sharpened his attacks and asked the public to pick a side.

In our interview, he continued the argument, describing Farage’s plan to deport people who currently have indefinite leave to remain in the UK as “racist”.

“I think that’s a very dangerous place for us to go as a country, and it goes against everything that I believe in,” he told me.

But Starmer was keen to play the ball, not the man, as he told me he didn’t think Farage was a racist and stressed that he didn’t think Reform voters were racist either.

“They’re concerned about things like our borders,” he said.

“They’re frustrated about the pace of change. So I’m not for a moment suggesting that they are racist.”

His careful delineation reflects some nervousness at the top of his party that his attacks on Farage’s racist immigration policy is risky if those millions of Britons thinking of voting for Reform feel they are being judged as racist themselves.

Read more:
Starmer ‘responsible’ if anything happens to Farage, Reform say
PM’s speech a successful moment – but it ignored a big issue

One cabinet minister, acknowledging the risk, said they thought it was “net positive” because it gives the party a purpose and an argument to take the fight to Reform, not around competence – Labour have hardly proved themselves on that front yet – but around values.

But this is where the prime minister also got a bit stuck in our sit-down.

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Happily calling out Farage’s plan to deport people with indefinite leave to remain if they hit stringent income and language requirements, as a racist policy, he wouldn’t tackle Donald Trump over his overtly racist attack on Sir Sadiq Khan when he suggested the London mayor, who is a Muslim, was driving London to Sharia law.

He called it nonsense, but when pressed about whether it was racist – which Khan has explicitly said it is – the prime minister told me he was “not going to start down the road of discussing whether things said by others are racist or not” – having moments earlier overtly criticised Farage for having a “racist policy”.

When I pointed this out to him, he didn’t really have anywhere left to go in what was an awkward exchange.

That he wouldn’t call out Trump speaks to the bigger challenge he faces than taking on Farage – delivering the “renewal” he says Britain so badly needs.

What Starmer did powerfully in one of the strongest speeches I’ve ever seen him deliver was offer clear analysis of the journey that brought Britain to the place it is now, and the alternative directions the country could go next.

But what is far, far harder than the diagnosis is the treatment. He won’t call out Trump because he needs the US president to go easy on tariffs, to work with Europe on Ukraine, to support the recently announced tech partnership, which Number 10 said could deliver £150bn of investment into the UK economy in the coming decade.

He might feel unable to criticise Trump, but the PM is borrowing the battle lines from the US, mirroring here what Joe Biden tried to do in the US ahead of the 2022 mid-term elections.

The then US president delivered a speech called the “battle for the soul of the nation” as he cast Trump and his allies as a threat to the country and to democracy, and the Democrats as the defenders of America’s core values.

Of course, it turned out that President Biden wasn’t the man to take on Trump, and paved the way to his victory by leaving it too late for another leader to take up the fight. Starmer’s team feels more confident after this week that the PM has seen off similar fears around him – for the time being at least.

But the fundamentals are still so difficult, with a challenging budget ahead and then a crucial set of elections in England, Scotland and Wales next May which could prove – to quote one Starmer detractor – “a massive moment of change”.

For now, a PM and a party pointing towards a common enemy, but Starmer’s battle is only just beginning. And, as for the journey, it’s a very, very long road ahead.