A Palestinian man jailed for illegally entering Britain and accused of calling for the killing of Jews has asked to be deported, but the Home Office is unable to return him to Gaza because it has no safe means of doing so.
Mosab Abdulkarim Al-Gassas, known as Abu Wadee, arrived in the UK by small boat in March 2025. He was arrested two months later after his alleged links to a Hamas-affiliated militant group and antisemitic social media posts were exposed.
The 34-year-old pleaded guilty to illegal entry and was imprisoned before being released in December and moved into asylum accommodation. He is now wearing an electronic tag.
Wadee was recently traced to accommodation in Corby, Northamptonshire. He has since been moved to another location after attracting press attention and has posted videos calling for his immediate removal from Britain.
In one video, translated from Arabic, he said: “I am calling upon the Red Cross and human rights organisations all over the world to organise my removal from Britain. I wish to be relocated right now, before tomorrow.”
However, Gaza remains an active conflict area, despite a ceasefire said to have been in place for the past year. The Home Office is therefore understood to have no safe route for deporting him there.
Claims about Hamas links
Wadee has denied being antisemitic and now says he no longer supports Hamas, claiming that he only did so under duress while living in Gaza.
He has also rejected claims that he belonged to a militant faction, saying he was a construction worker and that photographs showing him carrying guns were taken at weddings, where he said such displays were customary.
“They publish reports about me and bring old photos of me carrying a weapon while I was in Gaza… those photos were at weddings,” he said in a video. “We all know our customs and traditions at weddings in Gaza. I do not belong to any faction.”
Wadee was previously identified as a member of the so-called Tyre-Burning Unit, a Hamas-affiliated group that operated during the Great March of Return protests on the Israel-Gaza border in 2018.
Images published at the time appeared to show him throwing rocks and posing with a tear gas grenade. Social media posts also showed him with assault rifles and appeared to show him throwing pipe bombs towards Israeli forces.
He was quoted by a Hamas-affiliated newspaper in Gaza boasting about sending flaming kites into Israel. Other posts showed him posing with rifles in front of a poster of Rouzan al-Najjar, a volunteer medic killed by Israeli troops in June 2018.
In another video, Wadee said participation in the protests did not prove affiliation to an organisation. “All the people in Gaza participated in the Marches of Return; it does not mean that if you went to the Marches of Return, burned tires, or threw stones that you belonged to an organization or were affiliated with a faction,” he said.
He told a local newspaper that he loved England and Corby, and claimed Hamas would kill people who did not speak against Jews while living in Gaza.
Pressure on the Home Office
His continued presence in Britain has prompted calls for his deportation, particularly after Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood reopened the UK Resettlement Scheme for Palestinians this week.
Home Office staff have also been instructed to flag Palestinian asylum claims for “reputational risk”. Corby MP Lee Barron has written to Ms Mahmood demanding Wadee’s removal, saying he had put “a target on the back” of other asylum seekers in the town.
A spokesman for the Campaign Against Antisemitism said it was “remarkable” that Wadee was asking to be deported while the Government could not arrange it.
“In May 2025, Mr Wadee pleaded guilty to illegally entering the UK on a small boat after we identified him, but it’s October and he is still in our country,” the spokesman said.
The Home Office declined to comment on Wadee’s individual case. A Government spokesman said foreign nationals given a prison sentence in the UK were referred for deportation at the earliest opportunity and barred from returning.
“Over 11,000 foreign criminals including murderers and rapists have been returned or deported in the two years since the last election – a 41 per cent increase on the two years prior,” the spokesman added.
