The Systematic Expatriation of Palestinian Populations: Institutional Architecture, Legal Implications, and Geopolitical Context of the Al-Majd Operations

Introduction

In mid-November 2025, revelations concerning two chartered aircraft transporting Palestinian nationals from the Gaza Strip to the Republic of South Africa catalyzed an international discourse surrounding allegations of demographically-engineered population transfer and systematized displacement mechanisms.

These developments have precipitated accusations of institutional complicity in what international legal frameworks characterize as potential crimes against humanity—specifically, the unlawful forced displacement of civilian populations from occupied territories.

The incident illuminates what international humanitarian law scholars and human rights organizations have identified as a coordinated, state-sanctioned apparatus facilitating the coercive expatriation of Palestinians under circumstances that systematically undermine the prerequisite conditions for genuine voluntariness.

The Departure Incidents: Chronology and Initial Documentation

Two distinct aerial operations facilitated the transnational movement of Palestinian civilians during the autumn months of 2025.

The inaugural charter flight, executed on October 28, 2025, transported 176 Palestinian passengers to South African territory without significant administrative impediments, resulting in their expedited admission into the receiving nation.

The subsequent charter flight, departing on November 14, 2025, precipitated more complicated circumstances.

South African border authorities detained 153 Palestinian passengers on the tarmac for approximately twelve hours, citing administrative deficiencies—specifically, the absence of exit documentation stamps in travel documents, insufficient accommodation verification, and ambiguous declarations regarding intended duration of residency.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa subsequently intervened on humanitarian grounds, articulating the justification for admission: “I said we cannot turn them back. Even though they do not have the necessary documents, these are people from a war-torn country, and out of compassion, out of empathy, we must receive them”.

Ultimately, South African authorities granted ninety-day visa exemptions to 130 remaining passengers, while 23 individuals continued to additional destinations.

The Operational Apparatus: Al-Majd Europe and Its Institutional Nexus

Investigative journalism by the Israeli daily Haaretz, corroborated by Al Jazeera reporting, has documented a sophisticated operational infrastructure orchestrating these expatriation flows.

The entity designated as Al-Majd Europe operates as an ostensibly humanitarian organization, marketing evacuation services to desperate Palestinian populations through social media advertising on Facebook and WhatsApp platforms.

The financial extraction mechanism employed by Al-Majd Europe demonstrates systematic exploitation of humanitarian catastrophe.

Palestinian families have remitted compensation ranging from $1,500 to $5,000 per individual, including dependent children and infants, to facilitate departure from Gaza.

These transactions frequently circumvented institutional banking channels, instead flowing through personal accounts rather than organizational banking infrastructure—a methodological configuration indicative of deliberate obfuscation of financial accountability mechanisms.

The Proprietor and Organizational Structure

Investigative analysis by Haaretz identified Tomer Janar Lind, an Israeli-Estonian dual national, as the operational director of Al-Majd Europe.

The organizational presentation promulgated through its web interface claims registration in Germany and establishment in 2011 in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, allegedly specializing in “humanitarian assistance and rescue operations for Muslim communities situated in conflict and warfare zones”.

However, detailed investigations have exposed this institutional façade as deceptive. Documentary evidence reveals.

The organization maintains registration in Estonia rather than in German jurisdictions.

The purported East Jerusalem office location contains neither visible signage nor institutional infrastructure.

Contact information distributed through the organization’s digital platforms remains non-functional. Al-Majd Europe operates through subsidiary consulting entities, obscuring direct institutional accountability.

The Operationalized Exodus Protocols

Palestinian participants described systematized departural procedures executed with coordinated temporal precision.

The sequence of operations adheres to the following methodological framework:

Palestinians located within Gaza registered through online submission mechanisms and underwent security clearance procedures administered by Israeli security apparatus.

Notification of imminent departure frequently arrived with minimal temporal warning—often at 2:00 AM—permitting minimal preparation and eliminating opportunities for deliberation or consultation.

Passengers received explicit instructions to transport exclusively smartphones, identity documentation, and minimal monetary resources, categorically prohibiting personal belongings or baggage.

Israeli-controlled transportation infrastructure conveyed passengers from Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing—a juncture administered by Israeli Defense Forces personnel—to Ramon Airport in southern Israel.

Critically, Israeli authorities systematically declined to affix passport exit stamps upon departure.

The aerial transportation route incorporated Nairobi, Kenya as a transit coordinate before proceeding to Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport.

Passengers reported that their ultimate destination remained undisclosed until post-embarkation, with numerous individuals possessing mistaken impressions they were being transported to Malaysia or Indonesia.

Institutional Israeli Governmental Coordination

Investigative reporting has established explicit documentary evidence of institutional coordination between Al-Majd Europe and official Israeli governmental bodies.

This represents the most substantively damning dimension of the entire operational apparatus.

The Voluntary Emigration Administration

Following a March 2025 security cabinet determination, Israel’s Defense Ministry established the Voluntary Immigration Bureau—subsequently denominated as the Voluntary Emigration Administration—specifically designed to institutionalize what Israeli governmental rhetoric termed “voluntary departure of Palestinians” from Gaza.

This bureaucratic apparatus operated under Defense Ministry administrative authority and jurisdiction.

Multiple Israeli human rights organizations—including Gisha, Adalah, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), and HaMoked—have characterized this administrative structure as inherently contradictory to bona fide voluntarism.

In official correspondence transmitted on June 12, 2025, these organizations articulated the fundamental legal contradiction: although presented as fulfilling Palestinian preferences, the apparatus functioned deliberately “to expel Gaza residents to third countries without the possibility of returning to their homeland in the future,” thereby constituting “explicit planning for mass transfer of civilians and ethnic cleansing, in severe violation of international law, amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity”.

COGAT’s Operational Facilitation

COGAT (the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories)—the Israeli military body administratively responsible for governing civilian movement across Gaza’s crossing points—furnished explicit operational authorization for these expatriation operations.

Documentary evidence obtained by Israeli media outlets demonstrated that COGAT “received the names of travelers, their visa documentation, and necessary travel documentation antecedent to aircraft departure”.

COGAT spokesperson Shimi Zuaretz corroborated this institutional involvement through public statements confirming that Palestinians could only depart Gaza “after COGAT received approval from a third country to receive them”.

This institutional gatekeeping confirms Israeli military apparatus provided prerequisite authorization for each departure.

Physical Infrastructure Facilitation

The Israeli military establishment facilitated the physical transportation of Palestinian passengers through militarized territory under IDF administrative control.

Buses transporting departing Palestinians traversed the Kerem Shalom crossing—a juncture exclusively under Israeli Defense Forces management—and subsequently proceeded to Ramon Airport in Eilat, southern Israel.

This geographic routing mandated coordination between Al-Majd Europe operational personnel and Israeli military authorities, confirming institutional integration.

The Broader Displacement Apparatus: Contextualizing the Operations

The Al-Majd facilitated expatriation operations must be comprehended within the larger institutional architecture of Israeli displacement policy formulated during and subsequent to the March 2025 military escalation.

Quantification of Displacement and Territorial Restriction

Since Israel renewed military operations in March 2025, official Israeli military authorities have promulgated evacuation directives displacing 684,000 Palestinian civilians and restricting habitable space to progressively diminishing territorial zones.

As of mid-2025, Israeli military administration had designated 82.6 percent of Gaza’s entire territory as militarized exclusion zones where Palestinian civilian circulation remains legally proscribed.

Cumulative data indicates that approximately 1.9 million Palestinians—representing roughly 86 percent of Gaza’s total population of 2.2 million—have experienced displacement since October 2023, with substantial proportions experiencing multiple successive displacements.

The Trump Administration’s Geopolitical Agenda

The Al-Majd operations operationalize policy architectures directly corresponding to frameworks articulated by United States President Donald Trump. On February 4, 2025,

Trump publicly declared intentions to “assume control over” Gaza, envisioning territorial acquisition and Palestinian population redistribution to neighboring nation-states.

Trump’s conceptualization included reducing the Palestinian population through territorial expansion toward neighboring territories, envisioning Gaza as a prospectively developed “Riviera of the Middle East”.

Subsequently, Trump promulgated a more formally structured proposal in September 2025, endorsed through United Nations Security Council mechanisms in November 2025.

While Trump’s refined proposal rhetorically emphasized that “no one will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so,” the framework simultaneously articulated provisions for “deradicalization” and proffered “safe passage” to Hamas operatives, thereby creating institutional pathways for population redistribution.

Human Rights Watch, in response to Trump’s February pronouncements, directly characterized such policies as constituting “alarming escalation of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza” and noted that Trump’s positioning alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—simultaneously wanted for atrocity crimes by the International Criminal Court—represented potential escalation from complicity to direct perpetration of atrocities.

Israeli Governmental Acknowledgment

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explicitly acknowledged the institutional coordination between Israeli governmental apparatus and expatriation objectives in March 2025, articulating: “We will see to the general security in the Gaza Strip and will allow the realization of the Trump plan for voluntary migration. This is the plan. We are not hiding this and are ready to discuss it at any time”.

International Legal Framework: Analytical Categorization of the Operations

The Al-Majd expatriation mechanisms require rigorous evaluation against established international humanitarian law categorizations and jurisprudential interpretations.

Ethnic Cleansing: The Contested Nomenclature

While “ethnic cleansing” constitutes the terminology most frequently employed by South African officials, Palestinian authorities, and international human rights organizations to characterize these operations, international criminal law presents a significant technical complication: ethnic cleansing lacks formal codification as a prosecutable crime under International Criminal Court statutes.

The foundational definition, established through UN Commission of Experts investigations of former Yugoslav conflicts, conceptualizes ethnic cleansing as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by utilizing force or intimidation mechanisms to expel populations of specified groups from designated geographical areas”.

However, this definitional formulation remains juridically non-binding and lacks institutional enforcement mechanisms.

International legal scholars and the International Criminal Court have determined that ethnic cleansing’s constitutive elements—forced population displacement, organized violence, systematic intimidation—manifest as prosecutable manifestations of subordinate crimes against humanity rather than as independent criminal categories.

Forced Displacement as War Crime and Crime Against Humanity

Under Article 8(2)(b)(vii) and Article 8(2)(e)(viii) of the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute, “forced displacement of population” constitutes a prosecutable war crime in both international and non-international armed conflicts.

Additionally, Article 7(1)(d) of the Rome Statute explicitly criminalizes “deportation or forcible transfer of population” when perpetrated “as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population”.

This categorization designates such conduct as crimes against humanity rather than mere military tactics.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has established that forced displacement constitutes customary international humanitarian law violations applicable across all armed conflict contexts, subject to strictly delimited exceptions. Such exceptions exist exclusively where “security of civilians involved or evacuation is necessitated by imperative military requirements”.

The Al-Majd operations systematically fail to satisfy these exception criteria.

The departure of Palestinians from Gaza does not fulfill military imperatives; rather, it facilitates demographic recomposition through systematic population extraction.

Furthermore, the institutional apparatus explicitly promotes permanent expatriation without guarantees of return to Palestinian territories.

Fourth Geneva Convention Violations

Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention—the foundational instrument governing protection of civilian populations in occupied territories—establishes: “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory are prohibited, regardless of their motive”.

The International Court of Justice’s 2004 advisory opinion regarding wall construction in Palestinian territories established with judicial unanimity that Article 49(6) “prohibits not exclusively deportations or forcible transfers of population…but also any measures undertaken by an occupying power intended to organize or encourage transfers of portions of its own population into occupied territory”.

This jurisprudential interpretation encompasses not exclusively transfers of the occupying power’s nationals but equally the facilitation of civilian population expatriation from occupied territory when such facilitation occurs through occupying power institutional channels and when genuine voluntariness becomes impossible under circumstances of military occupation and humanitarian catastrophe.

The Absence of Genuine Voluntarism: Contextual Analysis

International legal doctrine establishes that voluntarism constitutes an indispensable prerequisite for distinguishing lawful evacuation from unlawful forced displacement. The Al-Majd operations systematically operate absent meaningful voluntarism.

Israeli human rights organizations articulated this principle with particular clarity in June 2025 correspondence: under circumstances of active military occupation, massive humanitarian deprivation, systematic territorial restriction, and institutional Israeli facilitation of departure mechanisms, “genuine consent simply does not exist”.

The organizations emphasized that under conditions wherein Israel maintains administrative authority over departure processes and has explicitly declared intentions to facilitate permanent expatriation without right of return, any state intervention constitutes “forced transfer under international law”.

The structural conditions of Gaza—characterized by humanitarian catastrophe, uninhabitable environmental conditions acknowledged by United Nations emergency relief officials, active military operations, and systematic territorial restriction—render claims of “voluntary” departure juridically unsustainable.

Regional and International Responses

South African Governmental Reaction

The South African government, possessing extensive historical experience with systematized discrimination through apartheid institutions and maintaining institutional commitments to Palestinian self-determination through its genocide case against Israel filed in December 2023 at the International Court of Justice, responded with pronounced concern.

Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola articulated explicit accusations of coordinated Israeli ethnic cleansing operations, declaring: “We do not want any further flights to come our way because this is a clear agenda to cleanse Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank. It does look like it represents a broader agenda to remove Palestinians from Palestine into many different parts of the world, and is a clearly orchestrated operation”.

President Ramaphosa directed national intelligence services to investigate the operational apparatus and subsequently announced refusal to permit additional charter flights, characterizing such operations as representing potential “cleansing agenda” complicity.

Palestinian Authority Institutional Response

The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Palestinian Embassy in South Africa issued official cautionary advisories warning Gaza residents regarding “networks seeking to mislead and extract them from their homes,” recommending engagement exclusively with “official and legitimate representatives of Palestine” rather than “unauthorized organizations or intermediaries”.

African Nations’ Positioning

Documentation suggests that neither South Africa nor Kenya—the transit nation—possessed advance knowledge of these operations or maintained complicit participation in their orchestration.

Instead, evidence indicates these nations functioned as unanticipated destinations or transit points incorporated into the operational logistics without their institutional consent or comprehensive knowledge.

Kenya’s Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi acknowledged that the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority maintained appropriate aircraft documentation while urging parliamentary clarification through comprehensive Ministry of Transport communications.

Documentation and Investigative Evidence: The Factual Substrate

The allegations of Israeli governmental coordination rest upon substantive documentary and testimonial evidence rather than speculative claims.

Haaretz investigations—representing an Israeli institutional source rather than external partisan commentary—obtained documentary evidence including COGAT communications confirming advance knowledge of passengers, documentation, and visa arrangements.

Israeli media outlets reported military official acknowledgments concerning bus transportation coordination through Israeli military-controlled territorial zones.

Official Israeli governmental statements from Defense Ministry and Prime Minister Netanyahu explicitly acknowledged the institutional apparatus and policy objectives.

Signed correspondence from Israeli human rights organizations transmitted to Israeli governmental authorities detailed the institutional mechanisms and characterized them as violating international humanitarian law.

Al Jazeera investigations located archived website versions containing documented terms of agreement allegedly requiring Palestinians to relinquish return-to-Gaza rights and restricting compensation obligations.

Analytical Synthesis: What the Evidentiary Record Demonstrates

The available documentation establishes:

An institutionally organized operational framework encompassing an Israeli-administered entity (Al-Majd Europe, administered by Israeli-Estonian national Tomer Janar Lind) soliciting Palestinians through electronic media platforms.

Israeli Defense Ministry bureaucratic structures—specifically the Voluntary Emigration Administration—maintained direct operational supervision.

Israeli military apparatus through COGAT maintained explicit authorization mechanisms and advance knowledge of departure parameters.

Israeli Defense Force infrastructure facilitated physical transportation through militarized territorial zones to departure terminals.

Systematic operational repetition across multiple months suggests institutionalized rather than episodic operations.

Deliberate obscuration through passenger destination non-disclosure and documentation non-provision demonstrates systematic deception contrary to voluntarism prerequisites.

Exploitative financial extraction mechanisms demonstrate systematic economic predation upon catastrophe-devastated populations.

The evidentiary configuration aligns with institutional apparatus rather than clandestine unauthorized activities.

Conclusion

The Institutional Architecture of Demographic Recomposition

The Al-Majd Europe operations represent a methodologically sophisticated instrument of institutionalized population transfer—what international legal frameworks would characterize as forced displacement—operationalized within the administrative structures of Israeli governmental apparatus in coordination with explicitly stated geopolitical objectives articulated by United States governmental officials.

The operations do not constitute hidden conspiracy but rather represent bureaucratically formalized, explicitly acknowledged policy implemented through designated institutional mechanisms, coordinated across governmental departments, financed through state administrative structures, and facilitated through military infrastructure.

The demographic trajectory—approximately 1.9 million Palestinians displaced, 82.6 percent of Gaza territory designated as exclusion zones, 47 forcible displacement military orders issued since March 2025—indicates systematic rather than ad hoc population recomposition.

What remains to be investigated includes the complete operational scope, the aggregate numbers of Palestinians transited through similar mechanisms, the comprehensive roster of receiving nations, temporal trajectory and anticipated future expansion of the apparatus, and whether these operations constitute preliminary manifestations of larger systematized displacement campaigns aligned with stated Trump administration geopolitical frameworks.

The legal characterization—whether properly denominated forced displacement war crime, crime against humanity, ethnic cleansing, or potential genocide depending upon evidential elaboration regarding specific intent—must ultimately be determined by competent international judicial authorities.

Nevertheless, the operational documentation and institutional architecture appear sufficient to sustain rigorous international investigation and potential criminal prosecution under established international humanitarian law frameworks.