by Dr Oroub El-Abed

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

When a chartered flight carrying more than 150 Palestinians from Gaza landed in Johannesburg last week, confusion filled South African airwaves. As reported by The Guardian (15 Nov 2025), the passengers — weary, hungry, and bewildered — were held on board for hours, unable to explain where they had come from or who had organised their journey. Most had no exit stamps or official travel documents. To many observers, it looked like a logistical mishap amid the chaos of war. Yet behind the scenes, a far more disturbing pattern appears to be emerging: the quiet transformation of forced displacement into a new, bureaucratic face of ethnic cleansing.

For decades, Zionist Israel has pursued systematic methods to dispossess Palestinians. The open violence — bombardment, blockade, and home demolitions — is merely the most visible. Yet the subtler machinery of displacement has never ceased. It operates quietly, through psychological exhaustion, bureaucratic restriction, and controlled mobility.

Palestinians released from Israeli prisons are often expelled directly from their homeland or denied permits to return to their cities and villages. Others are subjected to constant harassment and surveillance, confined by administrative orders that make normal life impossible. Many former detainees describe being pushed to the conclusion that leaving Palestine is their only viable escape from unending humiliation and control.

The same logic extends to the younger generation. Students and youth activists live under perpetual monitoring — their academic lives, social gatherings, and even online presence are tracked, creating a climate of fear that narrows both their physical and intellectual space. The goal is not only to punish resistance but to suffocate hope, turning departure into a coerced choice.

The latest events merely reveal another layer of this long continuum: expulsion through paperwork, or more precisely, through the deliberate absence of it. Multiple investigations show that passengers were escorted through the Karam Salem crossing and transferred to Israel’s Ramon Airport without their passports being stamped. Bureaucratically, this erases their legal identity; without proof of exit, their right of return dissolves. Politically, it signals a chilling shift from siege to disappearance — the continuation of ethnic cleansing by administrative means.

The organisation behind these “humanitarian” flights calls itself Al-Majd Europe. On its own website, the group describes itself as a humanitarian organisation “founded in 2010 in Germany” and “specialising in providing aid and rescue efforts to Muslim communities in conflict and war zones.” Its self-presentation is steeped in religious language — “Our roots are rooted in the values and heritage of Islam, and our headquarters are located in Jerusalem” — projecting an image of benevolent rescue and offering “evacuation services” to Gazans. Yet the site also includes a disclaimer warning against “hidden smugglers using our name and asking for money.”

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Investigative journalists from AP and Al Jazeera  have since uncovered a digital mirage: a domain registered abroad, cryptocurrency payment options, AI-generated staff photos, and no verifiable headquarters. Families in Gaza reportedly paid thousands of dollars to secure passage, only for the organisation to vanish once the flights landed. Is this the latest form of smuggling — not into, but away from the homeland? What masquerades as rescue thus becomes complicity, a humanitarian mask concealing the machinery of erasure.

The spectacle is disturbingly familiar. In 1933, Nazi Germany signed the Haavara (“Transfer”) Agreement with Zionist agencies — a plan enabling German Jews to emigrate to Palestine by exporting their assets as German industrial and agricultural equipment. At the time, the scheme was advertised as humanitarian relief; in retrospect, it functioned as a logistical mechanism for demographic engineering. The parallel is unsettling: ninety years later, Palestinians are again being moved through networks that speak the language of rescue while erasing their legal and territorial claims. Al-Majd Europe, like Haavara before it, turns displacement into a business of reconfiguration — transforming a colonised population into mobile labour, and dispossession into managed mobility.

That the first of these flights ended up in South Africa is profoundly symbolic. The country that dismantled apartheid recognised, almost instinctively, the echo of its own past. When the passengers were finally released, President Cyril Ramaphosa intervened personally — welcoming them on humanitarian grounds but warning that South Africa would not become a corridor for disguised deportations. His statement cut through global indifference: this was not migration; it was the outsourcing of displacement.

The pattern is neither isolated nor accidental. Reports suggest earlier flights organised through similar channels and an expanding number of “relocation” offers targeting Palestinians trapped between war and economic despair. The Israeli role in facilitating undocumented departures cannot be dismissed as bureaucratic oversight. It aligns with a long-standing objective to depopulate Gaza without the spectacle of expulsion. By transforming refugees into “migrants,” Israel reframes dispossession as voluntary mobility and absolves itself of legal responsibility.

As AP reported, the operation remains shadowy. Rights groups fear it signals an attempt by Israel to push Palestinians from Gaza under the pretext of humanitarian coordination. The Washington Post reported that Israel’s Foreign Ministry referred questions to the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), which confirmed that Palestinians left Gaza “after approval from a third country” under a government policy permitting exits. It declined to name that third country. Since the start of the war, some 40,000 people have reportedly left Gaza under this arrangement as reported by AP.

The roots of this policy reach back to the Trump administration, when Washington briefly endorsed a plan to “empty Gaza permanently” of its population which international lawyers described as ethnic cleansing. Though President Trump later abandoned that rhetoric while brokering a ceasefire, the underlying ambition in order to reduce Gaza’s demographic weight has quietly persisted through administrative means.

Testimonies from Jerusalem and Jordan reveal that this machinery of quiet transfer extends well beyond Gaza. Each week, buses reportedly depart through neighbouring countries or via Ramon Airport, carrying Palestinians enticed by online campaigns promising “legal migration opportunities” — framed as educational scholarships, job offers, medical treatment, or family reunification. Applicants fill out forms, pay fees, and are told they have “won” relocation — an illusion of luck masking financial exploitation. Locals point to a web of intermediaries linked to international entities and private offices such as Al-Majd, believed to have ties in Jerusalem and Countries in the West. One of its figures allegedly sought to run for municipal elections in Israel years ago.

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Economic predation is only one layer of harm. Beneath it lies a deeper political design: demographic re-engineering. While select groups are quietly granted Israeli citizenship or residency through new administrative channels, restrictions on Palestinians holding temporary or permanent Jordanian passports intensify. Bureaucratic obstacles such as delays at bridge crossings, arbitrary “security reviews,” the rising cost of renewals , create pressure to leave or to seek new documents abroad. The cumulative effect is to blur identity, exhaust mobility rights, and fracture the continuity of Palestinian belonging.

This is ethnic cleansing by other means: the slow unmaking of a people through procedures, incentives, and silence. The humanitarian façade only deepens the crime, for it invites the world to mistake coercion for compassion. International law has yet to catch up with these invisible forms of transfer with no gunfire, no camps, no headlines.

Equally troubling is the regional silence. No Arab government has demanded clarification on how Palestinians, still under siege, were escorted through Israeli territory to foreign airports. No official has questioned who authorised their passage or why their identities were left deliberately undocumented. The international community, meanwhile, treats the case as a “migration anomaly,” reducing a political crime to a bureaucratic curiosity. In an age obsessed with migration management, the border has become both weapon and excuse.

What emerges is a new humanitarian economy ; one that profits from despair while serving geopolitical agendas. Each “evacuation” flight reduces the demographic pressure Israel seeks to erase; each visa issued elsewhere shifts responsibility from the occupier to the host. Even well-meaning aid actors risk becoming instruments of this design when oversight fails.

South Africa’s stance offers a rare moment of moral clarity. Its refusal to participate reminds us that apartheid , whether in the form of walls or airports ,  can only persist through global complicity. Yet moral clarity alone is not enough. The Palestinian displacement project has entered officially a new phase that is quieter, procedural, almost invisible. Unless states, journalists, and civil society expose the networks behind these operations, the world may soon awaken to find an emptied Gaza and a scattered people — all with paperwork, but without rights.

The image of Palestinians stepping onto unmarked planes with no flag and no stamp may seem benign beside the devastation of Gaza’s ruins. But it captures the next chapter of erasure. The weapon is no longer the bomb but the boarding pass; the target no longer the body, but the legal trace that ties it to home. When the architecture of expulsion is rebuilt in the language of humanitarianism, silence becomes complicity.

History will not forgive the world for ignoring these silent flights. They are not anomalies. They are the future blueprint of ethnic cleansing — refined, digital, and deniable.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.