Deportation Bombshell Out of Gaza Has Israel Scrambling for Cover

Right, so you know things have gone sideways when a planeload of Palestinians turns up in Johannesburg and the South African government has to ask who sent them, why nobody called ahead, and why half of them didn’t even know they were coming until the stopover in Nairobi. And then you look at the paperwork and realise there isn’t any, which is always a good sign when civilians are being moved out of a war zone isn’t it? The group doing the moving calls itself Al-Majd Europe, which sounds like a respectable NGO until you try to find the registration, the office or the legal trail and discover the whole thing is basically a social-media inbox linked to an Estonian recruitment outfit. And then you see the buses came through Kerem Shalom, escorted by Israeli authorities, and it stops being a mystery flight and starts looking like something far more familiar: a quiet removal dressed up as a rescue.
Right, so a few days ago a passenger plane landed in Johannesburg carrying 153 Palestinians from Gaza and nobody in South Africa knew they were coming, nobody in the South African government had authorised the arrival, and nobody in that airport knew what paperwork they were meant to ask for because none of the passengers had visas, none had Israeli exit stamps, and most of them didn’t even know they were headed to South Africa until the layover in Nairobi. You don’t need to start a video like this with shock because that’s the trick every official involved is hoping will run out the clock; you start by saying plainly what has happened because the plain version is already staggering enough. These people were taken out of Gaza under siege conditions, driven through Kerem Shalom, escorted across Israeli territory, loaded onto a charter flight at Ramon Airport, and deposited in a country that had never agreed to take them. That’s what happened. Everything else is mechanics and consequence, which is where the politics sits right now.
And when you look at who arranged it, you hit the first absurdity. The operation is fronted by a group calling itself Al-Majd Europe, which claims to be a humanitarian outfit founded in Germany in 2010 but appears in all the actual reporting as an unregistered, opaque organisation with no documented office, a social-media presence that looks more like a recruitment funnel than a charity, and a record of advertising offers to “evacuate” Palestinians from Gaza for fees running into the thousands. Various reports claim the fees run between $1,500 and $5,000 and every one of the outlets reporting on this, the likes of Middle East Eye, Al Jazeera and Anadolu Agency – no western mainstream media of course - is quoting passengers or Palestinian intermediaries who say the same thing: the money was taken up front and the destination was never explained. If people don’t know where they’re going, they can’t possibly know what they’re paying for, which is the part the Israeli government and Al-Majd both need you not to dwell on because that destroys the entire claim of voluntariness before you even reach the runway at Ramon.
Now, you can’t take anybody out of Gaza without the permission of the Israeli state because Israel still controls the exit routes, the crossings, the airport, the approvals, everything. We all know that. Kerem Shalom is not some neutral channel; it’s an Israeli military crossing controlled by coordinate lists, identity checks and political conditions. So when you find out that these buses were escorted through Kerem Shalom into Israel, then driven to Ramon Airport under Israeli authority, with passenger lists submitted to COGAT in advance, you’re not looking at an NGO improvising a humanitarian corridor; you’re looking at a state-enabled movement of people under siege conditions. And the point is obvious: Al-Majd cannot move a paper bag through Kerem Shalom, let alone 153 Palestinians, without Israeli clearance.
So the question isn’t “was Israel involved?” You can see the involvement as soon as you map the route out. The real question is: what kind of involvement is this? This isn’t humanitarian coordination; there’s no UNHCR, IOM, ICRC or OCHA in sight. None of the bodies that handle refugee movement are present. These aren’t formal protection transfers. They’re not transfers agreed with the receiving state. They’re not asylum procedures. These are charter flights carrying civilians under siege from an occupied territory to a state that didn’t sign anything and didn’t consent. Which leaves only one category of actor who could benefit from that arrangement, and it’s the actor who wants people out of Gaza.
Israel’s ministers have been talking for two years about shrinking Gaza’s population, making it unliveable, encouraging emigration, pushing people south, pushing people out. That isn’t a hypothetical; it’s documented. You don’t need to imagine hidden motives. They’ve been saying it out loud for long enough. And when the state that has flattened entire neighbourhoods, cut off water, blocked aid, shelled displacement zones and starved an entire population suddenly approves a quiet exit channel for those who can pay, well, you don’t need a lawyer to tell you what’s going on. It’s the same logic we’ve seen since October 2023, just in a cleaner format: if you can be induced to leave, you are no longer part of the political equation, and Israel can call that departure voluntary because you happened to board a plane.
And the thing is, the passengers didn’t leave Gaza because they fancied a relocation opportunity. They left because Gaza is being pounded, because starvation has been weaponised, because the medical system has collapsed, because hospitals have been destroyed, because the housing stock is shattered, because safe zones no longer exist, and because everything about life in Gaza has been engineered around the idea that staying is untenable. That’s the context. So the moment you tell people “you can leave if you pay”, that’s not a choice; it’s coercion dressed up as an opportunity, and the payment doesn’t make it less coercive; it makes it worse. It turns survival into a transaction. It turns desperation into a revenue stream. It lets the state say “we didn’t force anyone; they paid to go”, knowing full well that the conditions it created have stripped the concept of free choice down to nothing.
This is where the structure shows you what the intent is. Those people were not processed as refugees. They were not taken through UN channels. They were not given legal advice. They were not asked where they wanted to settle or whether they had family abroad. They were not part of any formal resettlement agreement. They were simply put on a flight. South Africa didn’t know they were coming. The passengers didn’t know where they were going. And Israel has spent two years trying to find countries willing to take Palestinians permanently because it wants fewer Palestinians in Gaza when the dust settles. So if you combine an unregistered NGO, a military crossing, an Israeli airport and a receiving country that wasn’t notified, what you have is not migration; it’s removal.
And here’s the part that really tells you what kind of game is being played. When the flight landed, South Africa held the passengers for 12 hours. Not because it wanted to, but because nobody had any idea what their status was, what documents they had, what rights applied or whether the flight itself had any legal grounding. And that’s exactly what Al-Majd and whoever is behind it needed to happen. Because once the plane lands, South Africa cannot deport them back to Gaza without breaking its own moral and legal stance at the ICJ, where it is arguing that Israel is committing genocide. You can’t say “we are taking Israel to court for killing Palestinians” and then deport Palestinians back into the zone you’re calling genocidal. And Israel knows that. So from Israel’s perspective, South Africa is perfect: a country morally bound not to refoule Palestinians, a country politically sympathetic to Palestinian rights, and a country caught between its legal commitments and its practical capacity.
So when these people land without visas or notification, South Africa has two choices: take them in or trash its own legal case. There is no third option. Israel benefits from that bind. Al-Majd benefits from that bind. The only people who don’t benefit are the passengers, who are stuck in a foreign country that never agreed to receive them, with no clarity on their rights or their future. And that’s the thing about this scheme: it distributes the consequences everywhere except back onto those who orchestrated it.
Now, you can call this trafficking if you want to talk about structure rather than law. And structurally it fits: deception of purpose, abuse of vulnerability, financial extraction, irregular transportation, and a lack of informed consent. People only discovered the destination in Nairobi. They paid thousands to leave a war zone. They had no documentation. They had no visas. They were routed through countries without explanation. Those are textbook trafficking indicators, even if no court has ruled on this specific flight yet. But more importantly, it fits the criteria for forcible transfer under international law: people removed from their territory without genuine choice, under coercive conditions, through channels controlled by the occupying power. The fact the passengers boarded voluntarily is irrelevant when their alternative was bombardment and starvation.
South Africa is now investigating because it knows it has been used. The Palestinian Embassy in Pretoria called Al-Majd “unregistered and misleading”. President Ramaphosa said these people appear to have been “flushed out”, which is about as blunt as a head of state is going to get in diplomatic language. Activists in South Africa say Israel used this NGO to move Palestinians out. And it all fits because you can see the pattern across these sources even if they’re not coordinating their coverage: every fact pushes towards the same conclusion.
The part that bothers me most is the legal limbo Israel has engineered here. These people are still Israel’s responsibility under occupation law because removal does not dissolve duty. If an occupying power moves civilians out, those civilians do not magically cease to be under occupation; the obligations travel with them. Israel knows that, which is why it needed a cut-out. Al-Majd becomes the organisation that can be blamed, the organisation that can be disowned, the organisation that can claim this was humanitarian, even though none of this resembles humanitarian procedure. And because Al-Majd is unregistered, unregulated and opaque, you can’t even trace who is paying who, which funding flows exist, where the money goes, who signed off on what, or how many other flights they have already organised.
And yes, there have been other flights. Al Jazeera reports flights to Indonesia and Malaysia. These aren’t isolated. This is a pipeline. It’s not yet public how long this has been running or how many people have travelled this way, but the fact that these routes exist at all tells you this is not a one-off accident; this is an emerging method. And once you understand that, you realise what this entire thing is: it’s a pilot scheme. It’s a proof of concept. If they can move 153 people quietly, they can move 300. If they can move 300, they can move a few thousand. The infrastructure is already there: Kerem Shalom, Ramon Airport, a charter company, a misleading NGO, a couple of states that get blindsided but legally cannot deport. The only thing missing is scale.
And that’s what people need to understand. Gaza is being hollowed out not just by bombs but by engineered desperation. And every time somebody leaves, Israel can claim that the ones who remain did so by choice, as if choice still means anything inside a besieged strip that has had its entire civic and humanitarian infrastructure flattened. Every departure becomes political cover. Every departure becomes precedent. Every departure becomes a data point Israel can wave around to say “Palestinians want to leave”, when the truth is that people trapped in a starvation siege will take any exit they can find.
And that is the final point because everything here loops back to this: the conditions are coercive by design. That’s why the voluntariness is false. That’s why the payments don’t signify consent. That’s why the lack of destination is not a detail; it’s a method. If you keep people uninformed, you stop them organising. If you keep states uninformed, you stop them refusing. If you keep documentation loose, you stop accountability. And if you let an NGO take the blame, you can deny the entire structure even as the buses roll through Israeli checkpoints under military escort.
This is not humanitarian evacuation. This is not migration. This is not protection. This is removal. And the fact they are doing it through an unregistered NGO with a social-media funnel and a history nobody has been able to verify tells you they know exactly how this would look if they admitted it outright. So they don’t. They leave it messy. They leave it opaque. They leave it just ambiguous enough that they can claim deniability until South Africa or somebody else drags the paperwork into the open.
But the truth is already visible in the mechanics. When people under siege pay thousands to leave, when they don’t know their destination, when the army of the occupying power escorts them through a military checkpoint, when the airport is controlled by the same state that has spent two years saying Gaza must be emptied, and when the country receiving them never agreed to receive them, the label you put on it is not evacuation. It’s not even subtle. It’s removal. Plain and simple.
International law means very little to Israel, neither does domestic law when it comes to Benjamin Netanyahu and with Donald Trump demanding a pardon for him from Israel’s president, that has been on show once more. The trouble is its backfired horribly, because its shone a light on the fact that to get a pardon, you have to admit guilt – and Benjamin Netanyahu refuses to do so, so get the details of that story here.
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