Johannesburg (Somalia Today) — South African intelligence agencies have launched an urgent investigation into an obscure network running a shadow operation that organizes travel from the besieged Gaza Strip.
The probe began after a chartered plane arrived carrying 153 undocumented passengers. The incident has exposed a controversial operation that is allegedly linked to Israeli authorities.
It has sparked fears that these mysterious journeys are, in reality, Gaza displacement flights designed to permanently empty the territory.
The controversy erupted last Thursday when a flight from Nairobi touched down near Johannesburg. The passengers—many without passports or exit stamps—spent nearly 12 hours stranded on the tarmac while local officials scrambled to process them.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa described the event as anything but routine.
“These are people from Gaza who somehow mysteriously were put on a plane that passed by Nairobi and came here,” Ramaphosa told reporters on Friday, noting that the refugees appeared to have been “flushed out” of Gaza.
The ‘Al-Majd’ connection
At the center of the storm is an entity calling itself “Al-Majd Europe.” The group markets itself as a humanitarian organization assisting Muslim communities. But investigative reports from the Israeli daily Haaretz and Qatar-based Al-Jazeera paint a more complex picture.
According to these reports, the operation is led by Tomer Janar Lind, a dual Israeli-Estonian citizen. Haaretz alleges that Lind coordinates directly with the Israeli military’s “Voluntary Emigration Bureau.”
The Defense Ministry reportedly created this unit to facilitate the departure of Palestinians.
The logistics of the operation reveal a high level of state coordination.
Passengers are not exiting through the Rafah crossing into Egypt, the traditional route for Gazans. Instead, buses carry families from Rafah to the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom crossing for security checks. They then travel to Ramon Airport in southern Israel to board international charters.
“Israel escorted the buses that transported the passengers… to Ramon Airport in the Negev,” Yedioth Ahronoth reported, citing a military official.
This state-facilitated passage has raised alarm bells among human rights observers, who warn that it resembles a systematic pathway for expulsion rather than ad-hoc humanitarian relief.
Digital deception and ‘impact stories’
Further scrutiny of Al-Majd’s digital footprint raises serious questions about its legitimacy.
The organization’s website claims it began operating in Germany in 2010 and maintains offices in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem. However, onsite investigations by journalists found no physical office at the listed location.
Domain registration records show that the site went online only in February 2025, contradicting its claims of a decade-long history.
The deception extends to its content. One section features “Impact Stories” of people supposedly helped by the group. One testimonial, attributed to a Syrian woman named “Mona,” uses a photograph that actually depicts Abeer Khayat, a woman photographed by a journalist in Lebanon in 2024.
The financial trail is equally opaque. Al-Jazeera discovered that organizers ask desperate families to pay between $1,400 and $2,000 per person.
Instructions provided to applicants direct these payments to personal bank accounts rather than a registered organizational fund.
A route through Nairobi
The flight that arrived in Johannesburg did not stand alone. Haaretz reported that a similar operation took place on May 27, when 57 Palestinians were flown from Ramon Airport to Budapest and then continued to Indonesia and Malaysia.
In the South African case, the group flew out of Israel on a Romanian aircraft, transiting through Nairobi before heading south.
The secrecy of the route left passengers in a precarious legal position upon arrival. South African border officials noted that the travelers did not know where they would stay. They also did not know how long they intended to remain.
The Palestinian Embassy in South Africa issued a blistering statement. It accused the organizers of exploiting “the tragic humanitarian conditions of our people.”
The embassy warned that the flights were arranged by an unregistered entity acting in line with Israeli interests to depopulate Gaza.
‘Systematic dispossession’
The broader context of these flights is the devastation of the Gaza Strip, where war has killed more than 69,000 Palestinians since October 2023.
With infrastructure in ruins, the demand for exit routes is desperate. However, academics warn that these specific Gaza displacement flights represent a strategic threat.
Oroub el-Abed, an associate professor at Birzeit University, told Al-Jazeera that the operation fits a historical pattern. “This is very much part of a long colonial pattern, a very systematic dispossession… to empty the land of its indigenous people,” she said.
According to Yedioth Ahronoth, nearly 40,000 Palestinians have fled the Gaza Strip since the start of the Israeli genocide.
Since October 2023, Israel’s war on Gaza has killed more than 69,000 Palestinians and injured over 170,700 others.
As the South African government continues its probe into the intelligence failure that allowed the plane to land unannounced, the focus remains on who exactly is profiting from the exodus of Gaza’s residents.
It also remains on whether these flights are a lifeline or a tool of permanent displacement.
