South Africa said on Monday that it will no longer accept chartered flights carrying Palestinian refugees. South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola accused the Israeli government of pursuing “a clear agenda to cleanse Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank.”
In late October, rumors began swirling on social media of a mysterious chartered flight that brought 176 Palestinians to South Africa. The group evidently had the necessary paperwork to enter the country, but was provided with only one week of accommodations at hotels and AirBnB locations in Johannesburg. They were abandoned by their mysterious “benefactors” after the week of hotel time was up.
A second group of 153 Palestinians arrived in South Africa’s Johannesburg airport on Thursday aboard a chartered Global Airways plane from Kenya. The group held no departure stamps, returning tickets, arrangements for accommodations, or asylum paperwork. They were kept on board their aircraft for 12 hours while South African officials debated what to do with them — and, according to subsequent reports, made frantic background checks to ensure none of the passengers were members of Palestinian terrorist groups.
The Palestinians said they had no idea where they were being sent when they boarded the plane or who was sending them. The Palestinian embassy in South Africa said on Friday the refugees were “deceived” by an “unspecified, unregistered organization,” which charged them money for the refugee flight, but then “attempted to disown any responsibility once complications arose.”
South Africa initially denied the refugees entry, but President Cyril Ramaphosa told reporters that “out of compassion, and because they are a people that we as South Africa have raised our hands to support, we felt that we should accept them.”
“These are people from Gaza who somehow mysteriously were put on a plane that passed by Nairobi and came here,” he said, suggesting they were “flushed out” of Gaza for sinister reasons.
Ramaphosa said South Africa’s intelligence and diplomatic agencies would conduct “a proper evaluation” of the situation and “see what the future portends.”
The Israeli agency that handles civil affairs for the Palestinian territories, COGAT, said on Saturday that it permitted the refugees to leave Gaza after it “received approval from a third country to receive them.”
COGAT later revealed that the third country was none other than South Africa, although that claim of approval could have been falsely provided by the group that arranged the refugee flights.
Approval for Palestinians to leave Gaza is normally only granted for dual citizens, people who require medical treatment, and travelers with valid visas for third countries. According to COGAT, departure approval for about 40,000 Gaza residents has been granted since the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas started the Gaza war by attacking Israel on October 7, 2023, and most of those departures were authorized “solely on requests received from foreign countries.”
Accommodations for the Palestinian refugees were provided by a South African non-governmental organization (NGO) called Gift of the Givers, which promised to provide accommodations for the 153 Palestinians. Twenty-three of them have reportedly departed South Africa for other destinations, using visas and travel paperwork in their possession.
Gift of the Givers initially said it did not know who sent the Palestinians to South Africa, but on November 11 it issued a joint statement with several other NGOs accusing the Israeli government of using underhanded tactics to force the Palestinians out.
“On 28 October 2025, 176 Palestinian refugees who had fled the Israeli genocide in Gaza — mostly family units of mothers, fathers and children — were relocated to South Africa in a manner that raised serious concern about Israeli involvement,” the statement said.
“In an act of calculated deprivation, Israeli officials forced everyone in the group to abandon their bags, leaving 176 refugees without toiletries, medicines, or clothing except what they were wearing,” the statement alleged, referring to the first group of Palestinians sent to South Africa.
A great deal of confusing and contradictory testimony was collected from the Palestinians over the ensuing two weeks. Many of them spoke of paying thousands of dollars in fees to a shadowy company called “Al-Majd Europe.”
Critics of the Israeli government accused it of secretly creating, or working with, Al-Majd in a bid to move Palestinians out of Gaza and send them to South Africa, which has accused Israel of committing genocide. Others saw Al-Majd as a predatory operation that bilked Palestinians who were desperate to flee the ruins of Gaza after the war.
“This is part of ethnic cleansing. Israel has been using this policy. They bombed people with 2,000-pound bombs, tried everything and couldn’t kill everybody,” Gift of the Givers founder Imtiaz Sooliman said on Saturday.
“They tried starvation. They killed 300 journalists, more than in all wars put together, to hide the truth — eventually, when this is not working, the best thing now is to put people in cars and planes and send them away,” Sooliman said without citing the source of these statistics.
Israel’s left-wing Haaretz reported on Sunday that Al-Majd was founded by a “dual Israel-Estonian national” named Tomer Janar Lind.
The report said Al-Majd had a very sketchy digital footprint, with seemingly little valid public information about its owners or management, although an archived web page pointed back to a company that was established by Lind:
According to Al-Majd’s website, the organization was founded in 2010 in Germany and maintains offices in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. However, Haaretz found that no organization by that name is registered in Germany or East Jerusalem, and the website itself was only launched in February of this year. Links to social media accounts lead nowhere. The site also claims to have aided victims of the 2023 Turkey earthquake and Syrian civil war refugees, but provides no evidence to support these claims.
The website also lists two “project managers”: Adnan from Jerusalem and Muayad from Gaza. Muayad posted on Instagram a photo showing himself boarding a Romanian plane that left in May for Indonesia, writing: “I left Gaza — a land of war and hunger — and I will not return. As long as the killing continues, minds are murdered, and dignity is buried… peace be upon Gaza from afar.” Haaretz could not find any information online about Adnan.
According to Haaretz, Al-Majd was referred to COGAT to coordinate voluntary departures from Gaza by the Voluntary Emigration Bureau, which was established in March by the Israeli military to ease the security requirements for Palestinians seeking to emigrate.
Al-Majd appears to be the most aggressive and successful company expediting Palestinian emigration and it appears to have properly handled all of the arrangements for the two chartered flights out of Gaza with COGAT and the Kenyan government.
The Israeli government has yet to make an official statement about the situation beyond insisting that South Africa was the government on record as requesting permission for the Palestinians to leave Gaza.
At a press briefing on Monday, South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola claimed last week’s planeload of Palestinian refugees was part of “a broader agenda to remove Palestinians from Palestine into many different parts of the world.”
Lamola said it was “a clearly orchestrated operation because they are not only being sent to South Africa. There are other countries where such flights have been sent.” He did not provide any further details or evidence to back up this assertion.
