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........

© Middle East Monitor