Humza Yousaf: Scotland ready to welcome Gaza refugees, relatives injured in drone attack

The First Minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf, said the country has offered to welcome refugees from Gaza and to treat the wounded in Scottish hospitals should the British government approve of a scheme to resettle civilians fleeing Israel’s genocidal war on the besieged enclave.

As part of a keynote speech at a conference for his party, the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) in Aberdeen yesterday, Yousaf said: “In the past, people in Scotland and across the UK have opened our hearts and our homes to welcome those from Syria, Ukraine and many other countries. Conference, we must do so again.”

“There are currently one million people displaced within Gaza. Therefore, I’m calling today on the international community to commit to a worldwide refugee programme for the people of Gaza.”

In the past, people in Scotland and across the UK have opened our hearts and our homes.

Scotland is ready to play her part.

To be the first country in the UK to offer safety and sanctuary to the people of Gaza.

To treat the injured men, women and children, where we can. pic.twitter.com/VMvszfZD4U

— Humza Yousaf (@HumzaYousaf) October 17, 2023

Yousaf, whose in-laws are trapped in Gaza, called on the British government to establish a refugee resettlement scheme, “for those in Gaza who want to and are able to leave,” and to support the medical evacuation of the many injured in Israel’s air strikes, the most recent of which targeted a hospital causing hundreds of civilian deaths, prompting widespread outrage across the region.

An hour before Yousaf’s closing address, his Palestinian wife Nadia El-Nakla and SNP councillor for Dundee City Council, revealed that members of her family in Gaza – three young cousins were injured in an Israeli drone strike.

She said her mother had called her with the news “really shaken and really upset” and that one cousin, a two-year-old, had “a lot of shrapnel under their skin.”

Many within Palestine and neighbouring countries have expressed skepticism and vehement opposition against the idea of making Gazans – most of whom include descendants of the internally displaced from the Nakba of 1948 – refugees once again, fearing that Israel will refuse to allow them to return, as they have done with the vast majority of the Palestinian diaspora and their families.

READ: Scotland’s new First Minister refuses to call Israel an apartheid state even though he has family in Gaza