Covert network flying Palestinians out of Gaza traced to Estonian company

The mysterious organisation allegedly flying hundreds of Palestinians out of Gaza has been traced back to an Estonian consulting firm.

It comes as more than 150 Palestinians were left stranded in South Africa after they were flown out of Israel without travel documents or plane tickets.

The passengers, who were reportedly unaware of their destination, were held on the plane for more than 12 hours before being given 90-day visas following the intervention of South African NGO Gift of the Givers.

This was the second plane to arrive in South Africa after 176 Palestinians were sent to Johannesburg in late October.

The flights were organised by a company calling itself Al-Majd Europe, according to an investigation by Haaretz.

The secretive company has since May allegedly flown hundreds of Gaza Palestinians out of Israel's Ramon Airport.

It encourages Palestinians to provide their personal details and pay a fee of between $1,500 and $2,700 to leave the devastated Gaza Strip, before being flown to seemingly random destinations.

The Haaretz investigation traced the company to an Israeli-Estonian national named Tomer Janad Lind.

Lind appears to have been working with the Israeli defence ministry's Voluntary Emigration Bureau, a department established earlier this year to facilitate the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.

The New Arab has reached out to the company and the Estonian embassy for comment.

Al-Majd claims to have been established in Germany in 2010 and says it provided humanitarian assistance to Syrians during the civil war and in Turkey following the 2023 earthquake.

However, its website was only created this year and it has not presented any evidence of activity in Syria or Turkey.

It says it has offices in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in East Jerusalem, though an investigation by Al Jazeera did not find any presence in the area.

Its website names two individuals supposedly involved in the organisation – Adnan from Jerusalem and Muayed from Gaza - featuring images that appear to be AI-generated.

The Palestinian embassy in South Africa described Al Majd as an "unregistered and misleading organisation 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".

An older version of Al-Majd's website features a logo of an Estonian company called Talent Globus, which is named as one of the organisers of the "voluntary emigration" of Palestinians from Gaza.

Talent Globus, which bills itself as a recruitment and consulting company, was founded by Lind last year.

Lind was born in 1989 and has Estonian and Israeli citizenship, according to company documents.

When approached for comment by Haaretz, Lind did not deny involvement in the company but declined to reveal who else was behind the effort.

COGAT - a unit in the Israeli military responsible for the civil administration of occupied Palestinian territories - told the newspaper that the evacuation of Palestinians is coordinated with the host countries, though sometimes it is done by third-party organisations.

It said that Al-Majd had provided it with the names of those who were flown to South Africa on Thursday and claimed it had arranged visas and completed the paperwork.

South Africa has opened an investigation into the company following last week's flight.