Deportation Bombshell Out of Gaza Has Israel Scrambling for Cover

Israel is embroiled in an all new scandal as they've been caught deporting Gazans to South Africa without anyone knowing they were coming, Right, so you know things have gone sideways when a planeload of Palestinians turns up in Johannesburg and the South African government has to ask who sent them, why nobody called ahead, and why half of them didn’t even know they were coming until the stopover in Nairobi. And then you look at the paperwork and realise there isn’t any, which is always a good sign when civilians are being moved out of a war zone isn’t it? The group doing the moving calls itself Al-Majd Europe, which sounds like a respectable NGO until you try to find the registration, the office or the legal trail and discover the whole thing is basically a social-media inbox linked to an Estonian recruitment outfit. And then you see the buses came through Kerem Shalom, escorted by Israeli authorities, and it stops being a mystery flight and starts looking like something far more familiar: a quiet removal dressed up as a rescue. Right, so a few days ago a passenger plane landed in Johannesburg carrying 153 Palestinians from Gaza and nobody in South Africa knew they were coming, nobody in the South African government had authorised the arrival, and nobody in that airport knew what paperwork they were meant to ask for because none of the passengers had visas, none had Israeli exit stamps, and most of them didn’t even know they were headed to South Africa until the layover in Nairobi. You don’t need to start a video like this with shock because that’s the trick every official involved is hoping will run out the clock; you start by saying plainly what has happened because the plain version is already staggering enough. These people were taken out of Gaza under siege conditions, driven through Kerem Shalom, escorted across Israeli territory, loaded onto a charter flight at Ramon Airport, and deposited in a country that had never agreed to take them. That’s what happened. Everything else is mechanics and consequence, which is where the politics sits right now. And when you look at who arranged it, you hit the first absurdity. The operation is fronted by a group calling itself Al-Majd Europe, which claims to be a humanitarian outfit founded in Germany in 2010 but appears in all the actual reporting as an unregistered, opaque organisation with no documented office, a social-media presence that looks more like a recruitment funnel than a charity, and a record of advertising offers to “evacuate” Palestinians from Gaza for fees running into the thousands.