While Israel closes the crossings to patients and students, it secretly moves Palestinians through its airports in a disguised act of deportation
Amid the siege, bombardment, and the near total collapse of life in the Gaza Strip, a new story emerged that sharply reveals how the lives of people, their freedom of movement, and even their very existence have become tools in a harsh political game. At the same time that Israel has kept all official crossings shut for months, prevented patients from traveling for treatment, blocked students from continuing their education abroad, and denied the exit of foreign passport holders despite repeated appeals, it opened a different door. This door does not resemble a border crossing or normal travel. It resembles forced displacement more than anything else.
The story began when news spread of a plane carrying 153 Palestinians from Gaza landing at OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg, South Africa. The incident appeared strange, surprising, and full of unanswered questions. How did these people leave Gaza while patients are dying at the crossings? Who allowed them to leave? Who organized the flight? Why South Africa? Why an Israeli airport? And what does it mean that they left without any Israeli exit stamp on their passports? These details, which may seem technical at first glance, are in fact the core of the entire story.
The aircraft had been chartered. It departed from Ramon Airport in the Negev, stopped in Nairobi, and then continued to Johannesburg. It was not the first flight. Another flight on twenty eight October had carried 176 Palestinians in the same manner. The passengers were not ordinary travelers. They included children, entire families, and a pregnant woman in her ninth month. They were people fleeing bombs and burning homes, seeking nothing but survival. But what they encountered was not a path to safety. It was a carefully arranged operation that removed every trace of official documentation and placed them at risk of becoming people who may never be able to return to Gaza.
What happened inside the plane was alarming. The passengers were held for twelve hours without being allowed to disembark. None of them carried an exit stamp, and no documents confirmed that they had left Gaza through any legal route. This alone was enough to classify them as irregular migrants in any country they reached. After long hours of tension and uncertainty, South African authorities allowed only 130 Palestinians to enter under a visa exemption for ninety days. The remaining 23 were forced to continue to countries they did not know.
These were not normal travel procedures. They were the mechanics of a silent and polite form of deportation. The absence of an exit stamp was not an administrative oversight. It was a political weapon. It can later be used to claim that the individual left voluntarily or no longer resides in Gaza, which would allow Israel to close the door to their return.
While Israel was sealing off Rafah, Kerem Shalom, and every other crossing, blocking patients from leaving to the point that more than nine hundred people died unable to reach treatment, it was at the same time facilitating the departure of dozens of Palestinians through its airport with no transparency or legal framework.
The Israeli military authority COGAT was the body that authorized the departure of these passengers. It also decided that the trips would not be recorded in their passports, turning the entire operation into a calculated deception. Not only were the travelers stripped of their phones and luggage before boarding, they were also led step by step in a way that left them powerless, unable to object, and unaware of what awaited them at the end of the journey.
The most dangerous turn in the story came when the Palestinian Embassy in Pretoria commented on the matter. It pointed to an organization called Al Majd Europe, an unregistered entity with a website filled with artificial intelligence generated material, fabricated photos, and misleading humanitarian claims. The organization had taken between one thousand five hundred and five thousand dollars from each traveler, targeting families with children, and presenting itself as a humanitarian channel for safe travel. In reality, it collected money and abandoned the families in their most vulnerable moment, leaving them without documents or support.
Israeli media, including the newspaper Haaretz, revealed that the organization was not independent as it claimed, but linked to Israeli actors. The flight had been allowed only after permission from a so called third country. Israel said it was South Africa, but the South African government firmly rejected this claim, stating it had been surprised by the plane and had not been informed of any official flight.
The choice of South Africa was not accidental. South Africa has been one of the strongest opponents of Israeli actions in Gaza since 2023 and the country that filed the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Sending Palestinians there without legal procedures, then claiming that South Africa had approved the process, was an attempt to exploit its supportive stance and perhaps to embarrass it or push it into assuming responsibility for something unlawful. Once South Africa discovered the absence of legal procedures, it refused to receive a third flight and described the operation as an act of irregular deportation.
Had South Africa not noticed these irregularities, it might have come under international pressure later, and could have been portrayed as a participant in removing Palestinians from their land or as a country that accepted their resettlement. This is exactly what Israel wanted: to establish a new reality in which Palestinians appear to be leaving Gaza willingly.
This incident was not an isolated event. It aligned perfectly with statements made by Israeli officials from the first day of the war that began in October 2023. The extremist minister Itamar Ben Gvir repeatedly declared that encouraging migration from Gaza is the only solution. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich openly stated that reducing the number of Arabs in Gaza is a strategic goal. These statements cannot be separated from the story of the flights. They are the natural extension of an old idea: emptying Gaza of its people.
Similar messages continued through 2025. In February, Defense Minister Israel Katz instructed the military to prepare a plan for voluntary departure from Gaza, describing it as a humanitarian arrangement. In reality, it was a strategy to create conditions so unbearable that people would feel forced to leave. United Nations reports from late 2023 and through 2024 warned repeatedly that Israel was seeking a permanent demographic change in Gaza by pushing civilians out through displacement orders, starvation, and repeated evacuations from city to city.
Leaked proposals in 2025, including the so called Gaza Riviera plan which envisioned the full removal of the population and the conversion of the strip into a controlled coastal zone, reflected the same intent. Another presentation circulated in October 2025 showed foreign companies attached to reconstruction proposals, which rights groups described as a commercial mask for demographic engineering.
The pattern is the same logic that Israel has used in parts of the West Bank. Companies or organizations are placed between the state and the action, giving the impression of civilian or humanitarian involvement while the ultimate goal is the removal of Palestinians from the land.
In this light, the Al Majd Europe operation becomes part of a broader structure. It is a method of draining Palestinians emotionally and physically, pushing them into despair, and then offering a door that seems humanitarian from the outside but is in reality a trap that leads them away from their home forever.
With the complete closure of crossings, the daily deaths of patients unable to leave, and the destruction of medical centers, the use of an Israeli airport as the only exit point without any legal protection becomes part of a larger picture in which movement is a privilege controlled by occupation, and survival itself becomes something that can be traded.
The Palestinian who boarded that plane was not a traveler. He was a trapped human being who saw a door open at a moment of unbearable pain. He did not know that this door might erase his right to return or rob him of his legal identity, turning him into another victim of a long history of uprooting.
This story is not about a single flight. It is about the meaning of land, the meaning of return, and the meaning of being Palestinian in a time when travel becomes a battle, survival becomes a negotiation, and human existence itself becomes an administrative file shaped in political rooms. It is about an occupation that knows exactly how to use everything, even closed crossings, to create another door that serves its long project: a door of exit without return.
