 "A Palestinian man, one of 130 granted entry to South Africa after initially being denied for not meeting immigration requirements, walks with his child at an undisclosed location in Johannesburg, South Africa. Reuters")
Last week, hundreds of Palestinians arrived in South Africa.
And no one is quite sure what is going on. Officials said they were caught off guard by the arrival and that many of the Palestinians did not have the appropriate travel documents.
Behind it all is a shadowy group known as “Al-Majd Europe” – which some are alleging is a plot by Israel to displace Palestinians from Gaza. There are reports that the organisation charged Palestinians as much as $2,000 (Rs 1.77 lakh) per seat.
But what happened? What do we know about “Al-Majd Europe”?
Let’s take a closer look.
Plane on runway for hours as authorities investigate
A plane filled with at least 150 Palestinians , including families with children and a woman who was nine months pregnant, arrived at OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg on Thursday. The chartered flight from the Ramon Airport in Israel came via Kenya’s Nairobi.
Many of the people aboard the plane did not have the appropriate documentation needed while leaving Israel – for example, departure stamps on their passports. The passengers were kept aboard the plane for around 12 hours while the authorities attempted to investigate. Asked how long they planned to stay in South Africa or where they were going, the passengers offered no answer.
The Gazans have said they paid as much as $2,000 (Rs 1.77 lakh) per seat to fly their families to South Africa on a trip arranged by a group offering a way out of the devastated enclave. They said they were taken out of Gaza by bus and flown out of an Israeli airport to Nairobi last week.
Around 130 Palestinians were let into South Africa on a standard 90-day visa by President Cyril Ramaphosa. This came after a charity group, Gift of the Givers, offered to house the Palestinians. The rest of the Palestinians, around two dozen, flew to other countries. Ramaphosa has ordered South African intelligence agencies to investigate how this happened.
However, some within the South African government are already hinting that Israel may be behind the move.
“These are people from Gaza who somehow mysteriously were put on a plane that passed by Nairobi and came here,” Ramaphosa was quoted as saying by Al-Jazeera. “It does seem like they were being flushed out of Gaza,” he added.
Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola said, “Indeed, we are suspicious as the South African government about the circumstances surrounding the arrival of the plane and the passengers that were on the plane.”
“It does look like it represents a broader agenda to remove Palestinians from Palestine into many different parts of the world and it’s a clearly orchestrated operation because they are not only being sent to South Africa. There are other countries where such flights have been sent.”
While Lamola did not name Israel directly, his comments were widely interpreted as pointing the finger at Tel Aviv.
Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the arm of the Israeli military overseeing civilian affairs in Gaza, said the Palestinians left after approving assent from a third country. However, it did not specify which country it was referring to. COGAT also claimed that the Palestinians had valid visas. The agency said the departure request included “documents confirming authorisation to land in South Africa”.
“At this stage the information we have is that they didn’t have those required approvals and permits,” Lamola said. He added that the matter was being probed.
“We do not want any further flights to come our way because this is a clear agenda to cleanse the Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank,” Lamola said.
Interestingly, the Gift of the Givers founder Imtiaz Sooliman has claimed that this is the second such plane to arrive in South Africa. Sooliman, who accused Al-Majd of being one of “Israel’s front organisations”, said an earlier plane arrived on 28 October with over 170 Palestinians.
However, authorities did not announce the arrival of that flight.
What we know about ‘Al-Majd Europe’
According to the Haaretz newspaper, Al-Majd Europe is headed by Tomar Janar Lind, a dual Israeli-Estonian citizen.
Lind is said to have worked with a unit within the Israeli military known as the Voluntary Emigration Bureau, which was set up in early 2025. The group has been assigned the responsibility of forcibly removing Palestinians from Gaza and setting up such flights. Lind, who has not denied arranging the flights for the Palestinians, has refused to comment any further on the matter.
The Al-Majd Europe website claims it was formed in Germany in 2010. However, it offers no address or phone number. The location in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, which is under Israeli control, shows no office there.
Al-Jazeera said the Palestinians were made to pay via bank transfers. However, these transfers were made to personal accounts and not the account of Al-Majd Europe.
The Gift of the Givers NGO representative Sarah Oosthuizen said, “What we’ve been told is that they were promised some type of travel out of Gaza to some form of safety in a country that would welcome them.”
She said the passengers appeared to have been misled about their final destination, with a few believing they were headed to Indonesia, Malaysia or India.
Travellers in the first group — which included men, women and children — “definitely did not know that they were coming to South Africa”, Oosthuizen added.
The accommodation promised on arrival turned out to have been booked for only up to a week and, “when they were settled in these accommodations, their contact with Al-Majd went silent,” Oosthuizen said.
“This is not at all a random event,” said Oroub el-Abed, associate professor in international migration and refugee studies at Birzeit University in Ramallah. “This is very much part of a long colonial pattern, very systematic dispossession of indigenous Palestinians that has been
perpetuated by Zionist Israelis, and they want to empty the land of its indigenous people, using multi-faceted approaches,” she told Al-Jazeera.
The Palestinian embassy in South Africa said the travel of both groups “was arranged by an unregistered and misleading organisation that exploited the tragic humanitarian conditions of our people in Gaza”.
The group had “deceived families, collected money from them, and facilitated their travel in an irregular and irresponsible manner”, it added.
An Israeli government spokesperson, responding to Lamola’s comments, said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had “made it clear that if Palestinians want to leave, they should be allowed to leave the Gaza Strip. And if they want to come back to the Gaza Strip, they should also be allowed to come back”.
It was reported in May that Israel had eased restrictions on Palestinians leaving Gaza, and that around 1,000 of them had been bussed out of the enclave to board flights to Europe and elsewhere. The departures required a request to Israel by a foreign government.
South Africa has long been a supporter of the Palestinians and a critic of Israel. South Africa has also accused Israel of committing genocide, a charge Tel Aviv denies. Pretoria filed a case against Israel with the International Court of Justice in 2023, accusing it of genocide in Gaza.
With inputs from agencies