The UK’s Home Office has denied a group of Palestinian schoolchildren entry visas to visit the English town of Bolton as part of an initiative led by a local schoolteacher.
The children are from the Askar refugee camp in the north of the occupied West Bank, whose residents’ grandparents were expelled or fled in 1948 from towns and villages inside what is now Israel.
The students are aged between 11 and 17 years-old, according to the Bolton News, and some of them had already visited the town and the northwest of England a number of times as part of previous organised trips.
The teacher who helped plan the trip, Julia Simpkins, who is also secretary of the Bolton branch of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), said the Palestinian children were regular visitors to the town.
“The reason they gave for not giving them the visas is that they say they weren’t sure that they would return home at the end of the visit,” she told the Bolton News.