The Ghost Flights: How an Israeli Intel Group Built a Secret Pipeline to Empty Gaza of Palestinians

Contracts, passenger lists, and financial records obtained by AP expose a covert operation running since May 2025. An Israeli group founded by former intelligence officers and settler activists used a fake humanitarian NGO as cover. The Israeli military provided escort. The government approved it. Nobody told the passengers who was behind it.

Timeline of the covert charter flight operation - from the onset of war to AP's bombshell investigation. Credit: BLACKWIRE

The plane touched down at O.R. Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg without warning. Nobody in the South African government was expecting it. Nobody in the Palestinian diaspora knew who sent it. The 153 Palestinians on board - families with children, a nine-months-pregnant woman, men carrying whatever they'd salvaged from the rubble - couldn't say where they were going or how long they would stay. They'd been given no food for two days. They sat on a baking tarmac for twelve hours while immigration officials tried to figure out what to do with them.

The November 2025 flight was not an anomaly. It was the third documented charter in a pattern that began in May 2025, according to a bombshell AP investigation published March 16, 2026. At least three flights, collectively carrying hundreds of Palestinians, had departed Gaza - with IDF escort to the Kerem Shalom crossing, with clearance from the Israeli government body that controls civilian movement in Palestinian territories, and with a destination across the African continent.

The organization that arranged the flights called itself Al-Majd. Its website described it as a humanitarian charity founded in Germany in 2010 that aids Muslim communities in conflict zones. It listed no phone numbers and no specific address. The section listing its 14 partner organizations showed a message that read "will be announced soon."

Al-Majd, AP found, was a front. The operation was run by Ad Kan - an Israeli organization founded by soldiers, former intelligence officers, and settlers, led by a man named Gilad Ach who had publicly advocated for the permanent removal of Gaza's Palestinian population and who authored a detailed implementation plan for Trump's mass expulsion proposal.

This is not a story about rogue actors. This is a story about a covert government-enabled operation to displace Palestinians, using a fake NGO as cover, with full Israeli military coordination, while the world's attention was fixed on the war overhead.

Who Is Ad Kan - And What Is Its Real Agenda?

The name "Ad Kan" is Hebrew for "enough is enough." The group describes itself as a watchdog organization that infiltrates and exposes antisemitic and anti-Israel activist groups. For years, it ran covert operations inside Israeli civil society, embedding members in left-wing and pro-Palestinian organizations to gather intelligence for public exposure campaigns.

Its founder, Gilad Ach, is a West Bank settler activist and combat reservist. After October 7, 2023, Ach founded a second organization: The Israeli Reservists Generation of Victory. In interviews with right-wing Israeli outlets, Ach made his position clear. "Victory in Gaza meant taking part of the land and opening the borders so people could leave. They lost their territory, they lost population, this is a clear victory," he told the Jewish News Syndicate shortly after the war erupted.

His group circulated bus advertisements in Israel bearing a portrait of Donald Trump alongside the Hebrew slogan: "Victory = Voluntary migration... This bus could be full of Gazans. Listen to Trump, let them out!"

When Trump floated his proposal to permanently relocate Gaza's 2.1 million Palestinians in early 2025, Ach published a formal implementation document. The report proposed completing Palestinian emigration from Gaza within six to eight months, coordinating with the US to identify receiving countries, and outlined how Israel could facilitate mass departure. It concluded that the migration of all Palestinians was "entirely feasible," that they wanted to leave, and that emptying Gaza of its population was "an Israeli interest."

Ach declined to be interviewed for AP's investigation. In a text message to the wire service, he said he was "proud" to lead organizations supporting the rights of Palestinians in Gaza "who want to leave for safer parts of the world, free from Hamas." He denied that the flights were intended to cleanse Gaza of Palestinians and characterized them as purely humanitarian, noting that some passengers had paid part of their own costs.

But the documentary evidence tells a different story about the structure of the operation and who was in control.

The Shell Company: Al-Majd and the Art of Distance

The documented shell structure between Ad Kan, the Al-Majd front, and Israeli military coordination at Kerem Shalom. Credit: BLACKWIRE Analysis

The use of Al-Majd as an intermediary was deliberate. The purpose was to create organizational distance between the flights and Israel. An Israeli group openly running charter operations to relocate Palestinians from a war zone would generate immediate international scrutiny and legal exposure. An ostensibly independent German-registered humanitarian charity could operate in the grey zone.

Al-Majd Europe describes itself on its website as "supporting Palestinian lives." It lists aid and rescue efforts to Muslim communities in conflict zones as its primary mission. The site's opaque structure - no staff names, no verifiable partner list, no physical address - is a classic hallmark of a front organization built for a specific operational purpose rather than long-term institutional credibility.

When the November 2025 flight landed in South Africa and investigators began asking questions, Al-Majd's website updated with an unusual message: warning visitors that "people were impersonating it" to request money or cryptocurrency "under the pretext of facilitating travel or humanitarian aid." It did not respond to AP's requests for comment.

The Palestinian Embassy in South Africa issued a statement denouncing the arrangement. It called the organizing entity "an unregistered and misleading organization that exploited the tragic humanitarian conditions of our people in Gaza, deceived families, collected money from them, and facilitated their travel in an irregular and irresponsible manner." The Embassy added that this entity "later attempted to disown any responsibility once complications arose." (Palestinian Embassy in South Africa, November 2025)

Passengers on the flights said they didn't know who was behind their transportation. But the circumstances of their departure - bused to Kerem Shalom, handed over at the crossing, flown out of Israel's Ramon airport - make clear this was not a spontaneous civilian humanitarian operation. It required Israeli government authorization at every stage.

"There was famine, and we had no options. My children were almost killed. Death and destruction was everywhere, all day, for two years, and nobody came to the rescue."

- Palestinian man, 37, who arrived in South Africa November 2025. Spoke to AP on condition of anonymity.

The IDF Connection: Government Fingerprints on Every Flight

The Israeli military's involvement is the detail that transforms this story from a rogue operation to a state-sanctioned covert program.

An Israeli military official, speaking anonymously to discuss confidential information, confirmed to AP that IDF units escorted the buses that transported Palestinians from a designated meeting point inside Gaza to the Kerem Shalom crossing. Al-Majd's own buses then picked up the passengers at the crossing and transported them to Ramon Airport in southern Israel, from which they were flown out of the country.

This means the Israeli Defense Forces provided physical security for the departures. The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) - the Defense Ministry body that controls all civilian movement in Palestinian territories - confirmed that it provided approval for the operation. COGAT told AP that "the Palestinians on the charter plane left the Gaza Strip after it received approval from a third country to receive them as part of an Israeli government policy allowing Gaza residents to leave." (COGAT statement, November 2025)

Israel has maintained an official policy since the beginning of the war allowing Gaza residents who want to leave to do so, with third-country approval required. Approximately 40,000 people have left Gaza under this policy since October 2023. But the covert structure of these particular flights - the front NGO, the lack of advance notification to receiving countries, the fact that passengers arrived in South Africa without proper documentation or knowledge of their destination - indicates these were not ordinary emigration cases being processed through transparent channels.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich confirmed in early 2026 that Israel was working to identify countries to accept Palestinians and was preparing a "very large emigration department" within its Defense Ministry. "I think that the right thing to do, even according to the laws of war as I know them, is to allow the population to leave, and then you go in with all your might against the enemy who remains there," Netanyahu told Israeli broadcaster i24 in early 2026. (i24 interview, Netanyahu, 2026)

South Africa's Investigation - and What Ramaphosa Found

The documented scale of Palestinian departures from Gaza and the covert flight program. Credit: BLACKWIRE

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa was publicly blunt when the November flight landed at O.R. Tambo. "These are people from Gaza who somehow mysteriously were put on a plane that passed by Nairobi and came here," he said, announcing that South Africa's intelligence services had opened an investigation into who was behind the operation.

Ramaphosa said the Palestinians appeared to be "flushed out" of Gaza. South Africa's Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola had been similarly direct about an earlier flight that arrived in October 2025 with more than 170 Palestinians: "a clear agenda to cleanse out the Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank."

South Africa occupies a unique position in this story. The country is the lead plaintiff in the International Court of Justice genocide case against Israel, accusing it of violating the Genocide Convention in Gaza. Israel has denounced South Africa as "the legal arm of Hamas." That these flights were being routed through South Africa - of all places - speaks either to extraordinary carelessness or extraordinary arrogance.

The 130 Palestinians who remained in South Africa after the November flight were ultimately allowed entry after the NGO Gift of the Givers offered to accommodate them. Gift of the Givers founder Imtiaz Sooliman, who alleged the flights were organized by "Israel's front organizations," noted that this was the second such mysterious flight to land in the country. The passengers on the November flight, he said, "were given nothing on the plane itself - no food for the two days it took to travel to Johannesburg."

"Even though they do not have the necessary documents and papers, these are people from a strife-torn, a war-torn country, and out of compassion, out of empathy, we must receive them and be able to deal with the situation that they are facing."

- South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, November 2025

South Africa's intelligence investigation is ongoing. Its findings, if made public, could formally establish the Israeli government's direct role in operations that South Africa's own foreign minister has characterized as ethnic cleansing.

The Diplomatic Back-Channel: Sudan, Somalia, Somaliland, South Sudan

The covert flights are one arm of a broader diplomatic initiative that has been running simultaneously, largely in secret. US and Israeli officials told AP that government-to-government outreach had been made to Sudan, Somalia, Somaliland, and South Sudan - all of them poor, several of them actively destabilized by conflict - exploring whether they would accept large numbers of relocated Palestinians.

The overtures reflect the same logic as Trump's original Gaza proposal: offer financial incentives, diplomatic recognition, and security assistance in exchange for accepting people who don't want to go there. Sudan - which normalized relations with Israel in 2020 as part of the Abraham Accords in exchange for removal from the US state sponsors of terrorism list - was one of the first approached. Sudan's officials confirmed the contact and said they had rejected it.

Officials from Somalia and Somaliland told AP they were not aware of any contacts, though American officials confirmed the approaches had been made. Talks with South Sudan were confirmed by six separate sources familiar with the matter. A US lobbying firm working with South Sudan reported that an Israeli delegation was planning a country visit to evaluate setting up camps for Palestinians - with Israel expected to fund the infrastructure.

Two Egyptian officials with knowledge of the initiative told AP they had been aware of Israel's outreach to South Sudan for months and were actively lobbying Juba against accepting the Palestinians. Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza and fears a mass influx of refugees, has been the most consistent regional opponent of any Gaza depopulation plan since Trump first floated it.

The geography of the target countries is revealing. None of them are in the region. None of them have cultural, linguistic, or historical ties to Palestinian society. Sudan is re-emerging from a catastrophic civil war. South Sudan is ranked among the world's most fragile states. Moving 2 million Palestinians to these destinations - even "voluntarily" - would amount to permanent exile from their homeland under conditions far worse than those they left.

Rights groups have been unambiguous. Under international law, the forcible transfer of a civilian population - even one disguised as voluntary - constitutes a war crime when the conditions of departure are coercive. When people are escaping a two-year bombardment, starvation, and the obliteration of their homes, the legal threshold for "voluntary" departure becomes impossible to meet.

Trump's Reversal - and Why It Changed Nothing on the Ground

Trump publicly distanced himself from the mass expulsion plan in early 2026, saying Palestinians could remain in Gaza and pivoting toward a ceasefire deal with Hamas. But the covert infrastructure built to execute his original vision kept running.

This is the pattern of power: public statements and covert operations occupy different timelines. Trump's White House declined to comment on the diplomatic outreach to African governments. Netanyahu's office had no comment. Ron Dermer, Netanyahu's cabinet minister leading postwar planning, did not respond to questions.

What continued were the flights, the diplomatic approaches, the Defense Ministry's emigration bureau, and the private-sector organizations like Ad Kan that had built operational capacity to move people and were not going to dismantle that infrastructure because of a White House announcement.

The far-right members of Netanyahu's coalition who have long dreamed of a Gazan territory emptied of Palestinians had their window. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and the settler movement that produced Gilad Ach have spent years arguing that voluntary emigration is both feasible and desirable. The war gave them the political cover. Trump's proposal gave them international legitimacy for a moment. And organizations like Ad Kan gave them operational capacity on the ground.

The question now is not whether these flights happened. They happened. The documents say so. The passengers say so. The South African government says so. The question is whether they represent the full scope of the operation or the visible tip.

What This Is - A Legal and Moral Reckoning

The International Court of Justice case South Africa filed against Israel in late 2023 alleges violations of the Genocide Convention. Article II of that Convention prohibits not just physical killing but also "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" and "imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group."

A parallel legal framework applies under the Rome Statute governing the International Criminal Court. Article 7 defines "deportation or forcible transfer of population" as a crime against humanity when carried out against a civilian population as part of a systematic or widespread attack. The key word is "forcible" - and international law is clear that force includes coercion, which includes the destruction of the environment that makes remaining possible.

Palestinian rights groups and UN Special Rapporteurs have argued for months that the destruction of Gaza's housing, hospitals, water infrastructure, and food supply - combined with active efforts to facilitate and incentivize departure - creates coercive conditions that meet the legal standard for forcible transfer regardless of whether any individual was physically compelled onto a plane.

Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, has repeatedly warned that the combination of military destruction and emigration facilitation amounts to a plan to depopulate Gaza. Her findings are contested by Israel and the United States, but the documentary record being assembled - flights, contracts, passenger lists, financial statements, and now the AP investigation - provides precisely the kind of evidence that international prosecutors require.

"The profound hypocrisy... countries unwilling to accept Palestinian refugees."

- Gilad Ach, Ad Kan founder, in text message to AP. Defending the operation by noting international reluctance to accept Palestinian refugees - while simultaneously running the operation that displaced them.

The defense - that the passengers were free to refuse, that some paid for their own travel, that the operation was humanitarian - fails the basic test of context. People who have watched their neighborhoods demolished, who cannot access clean water or adequate food, who have lost family members, and who are surrounded by active military operations are not making free choices when they board a plane organized by an intelligence-linked organization whose founder has publicly called for their permanent removal from their homeland.

Ad Kan knew this. The use of Al-Majd as a front organization - the deliberate suppression of Israeli identity in the operation - demonstrates awareness that transparency would have generated the legal and political scrutiny that covert action was designed to avoid.

The Bigger Picture: How Power Operates in the Dark

This investigation is a case study in how state-level agendas are implemented through non-state proxies. The Israeli government could not openly run charter flights relocating Palestinians to African countries without triggering international legal proceedings, diplomatic protests, and domestic controversy. But it could create an official emigration policy, build military infrastructure to facilitate departures, and rely on ideologically aligned civil society organizations to execute the operational details at arm's length.

The same model appears in the diplomatic outreach. Rather than formal government-to-government proposals - which would be subject to disclosure requirements and parliamentary oversight in receiving countries - American and Israeli officials made informal contacts with leadership in fragile states where oversight mechanisms are weak and financial incentives carry disproportionate weight.

The covert approach creates plausible deniability at every level. When a South African foreign minister asks who organized the flight, the answer is Al-Majd - a German-registered organization that has no registered office and no verifiable partners. When a journalist asks COGAT about the flights, the answer is that Israel simply approved a third-country request, as it does routinely. When asked about the diplomatic outreach to Sudan and South Sudan, the White House says it doesn't comment on private diplomatic conversations.

Each node in the network can point to another node. No single actor appears to own the entire operation. This is sophisticated institutional architecture - and it is precisely the kind of structure that investigation must be designed to pierce.

AP's investigation does pierce it. The contracts obtained by the wire service connect Al-Majd directly to Ad Kan. The passenger lists show systematic organization rather than spontaneous departure. The financial statements trace money flows through the shell structure. The text messages show direct coordination between the organizations' leadership.

What makes this story significant beyond its immediate facts is what it reveals about the gap between public statements and operational reality. Trump said Palestinians could stay in Gaza. The operation to relocate them did not stop. Netanyahu said departures were voluntary. The covert structure of the operation was designed to ensure passengers didn't know who was behind their departure. The Israeli government said Al-Majd was a third-party humanitarian organization. The documents say otherwise.

South Africa's intelligence investigation is now formally open. The ICJ case continues. And the AP investigation - with its contracts, passenger lists, and financial records - has placed documentary evidence into the public record that cannot be walked back.

The passengers are scattered across Johannesburg, Indonesia, and wherever else these flights have landed. Some are building new lives. Some are trying to find a way back. Many didn't know, when they boarded, that the organization that put them on that plane had spent years working toward a Gaza emptied of Palestinians.

They know now.