Some 160 Palestinians fleeing Gaza were stranded on their plane at Johannesburg’s O.R. Tambo Airport for 12 hours on Thursday before eventually being allowed entry by South African Authorities.

Footage circulating on social media showed a Palestinian woman on the plane in tears over the situation.

After “two straight days of hardship and toil, between buses and planes, we received a very sad surprise,” she said. “The state is unable to receive us just because we’re people coming from a war.”

“My home is gone. I don’t have anywhere to go, any shelter. Where will we go? Enough,” she cried, adding: “Why us?”

According to Haaretz, the group left Gaza early Wednesday morning, via the Strip’s southern Kerem Shalom crossing with Israel, following Israeli vetting.

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Members of the group were then taken by bus to Israel’s Ramon Airport, near Eilat, where they boarded a chartered plane to Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, and from there boarded the chartered flight to Johannesburg.

South Africa won’t let refugees from Gaza leave the plane at Johannesburg airport tarmac. The Gazans have uploaded clips of their families stranded inside the plane.pic.twitter.com/9OaViti79j

— Ahmed Quraishi (@_AhmedQuraishi) November 13, 2025

An earlier group departing Gaza made an identical trip some two weeks ago and disembarked in Johannesburg without incident, Haaretz said. Both journeys were organized by an hitherto unknown organization called Al-Majd, which has received many requests from Gazans who want to leave the Strip, the report said.

The incident sparked widespread criticism of South Africa on social media as the country, which has led the allegations of genocide against Israel, was seen as unwilling to actually assist Palestinians.

Imtiaz Sooliman, a South African activist who has been helping the Gazans, blamed Israel, saying that it had sent the plane without coordinating with South Africa and had failed to put exit stamps on passports. It was unclear from Sooliman’s account how the Palestinians would have traveled to and from Kenya.

The South African Zionist Federation on Friday called Sooliman’s allegation a “calculated distortion weaponized to inflame outrage over facts,” given Israel uses electronic visas instead of physical passport stamps.

Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), which oversees the flow of people and goods to and from Gaza, also told Haaretz that the Palestinians had received visas from South Africa ahead of time. COGAT was also cited by the newspaper as saying that, as a rule, Israel always makes sure that there is a country that will accept Gazans departing the Strip.

Speaking to the South African Broadcasting Corporation on Thursday, Sooliman, founder of South African NGO Gift of the Givers, said the Gazans stranded at the airport in Johannesburg included a pregnant woman and several children, and that they were left hungry on a poorly kept plane with inadequate bathrooms, and were “really distraught coming from two years of genocide.”

Israel has vehemently rejected accusations of genocide in Gaza and accused Hamas of using Gazans as human shields.

BREAKING NEWS | About 160 Palestinian refugees have landed at OR Tambo International Airport this morning. The Gift of the Givers’ Imtiaz Sooliman says their passports don’t have stamps, and among them are children and pregnant women. pic.twitter.com/X68TXjGpgn

— SABC News (@SABCNews) November 13, 2025

According to Sooliman, the earlier flight of Gazans fleeing to South Africa carried 176 people. He said his and other aid groups attended to the Gazans’ needs upon learning of their arrival in Johannesburg on October 28.

“These people were displaced. They didn’t know where to go. They had no contact numbers, no phone numbers,” said Sooliman.

He added that the first group’s relatives informed his organization on Wednesday that a second group was scheduled to arrive the next day.

“Nobody knew about that plane,” he said. “It seems… Israel is voluntarily removing people from Gaza — you know, this is ethnic cleansing at its best — and taking away their goods, their hygiene packs, their food, sending them onto chartered planes.”

Sooliman urged authorities to “investigate how people are coming on chartered planes without stamps. Israel did not stamp the passports.” As a result, he said, South African border control officers “couldn’t allow them to get off the plane, simply because they were following rules” by not letting passengers alight in the country without valid travel documents.

Following Sooliman’s personal appeal to South Africa’s International Relations and Cooperation Minister Ronald Lamola and to the ministry’s director-general Zane Dangor, the Gazans were let off the plane hours after landing, the activist said.

“A lot of people have already offered food, clothing and medical support” for the Gazans who arrived in South Africa on Thursday, said Sooliman.


A Palestinian man walks past an unexploded missile in the Al-Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City on November 12, 2025. (Omar Al-Qattaa / AFP)

“We’re really grateful for South Africans, grateful for the government for making this happen, in keeping with our policy” of encouraging sanctions against Israel and pursuing genocide charges against the country at the International Court of Justice, said Sooliman.

Accusing Sooliman of “attacking Israel for South Africa’s own procedures,” the South African Zionist Federation lambasted the activist’s “attempt to pressure Home Affairs, demanding entry for the group as if he were a shadow minister.”

“South Africa is governed by the rule of law, not by the demands of private organizations. No NGO, regardless of its humanitarian image, has veto power over border control or immigration statutes,” said the federation.

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa said the country will “obviously need to look at the origins (of the Palestinians’ journey), where it started, the reason why they’ve been brought here.”

“Ordinarily, we would have said they should go back because they didn’t have any documentation. But…out of compassion, and because they are a people that we as South Africa have raised our hands to support, we felt that we should accept them,” he told reporters in Soweto, where he was overseeing a clean-up for next week’s G20 summit.


Humanitarian aid enters Gaza via the Kerem Shalom Crossing with Israel, in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, November 2, 2025. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)

Ramaphosa added that South African intelligence agencies, the Home Affairs and the Department of International Relations had assessed the group.

“We are going to do a proper evaluation and see what the future portends. We will make an announcement so that the people of South Africa know precisely what is happening.”

The foreign ministries of Israel and South Africa did not immediately respond to requests for comment, Haaretz said.

A security source cited by the newspaper said Israel has made the departure of Gazans easier, and approved over 95 percent of requests to leave the Strip, ever since US President Donald Trump, in February, presented a plan to oust Gaza’s residents and rebuild the Strip as a Mediterranean Riviera.

Trump appeared to back away from that plan in the comprehensive Gaza ceasefire plan he presented in September, which states: “No one will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return. We will encourage people to stay and offer them the opportunity to build a better Gaza.”

It’s unclear how many people have left the devastated Strip since the war, sparked by the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre in southern Israel, though Hebrew media reports have placed the number at around 38,000.

Reuters contributed to this report.