Several Palestinian men were deported from the United States on Monday using a private jet owned by the Israeli-American property tycoon Gil Dezer, a longtime business partner and donor of US President Donald Trump, according to a Thursday report by The Guardian.
According to the report, this was the second instance where Palestinians were deported from the US using this method.
In January, Left-wing Israeli daily paper Haaretz reported that eight men were taken from Arizona to Tel Aviv in Dezer’s plane, making three stops on the way in New Jersey, Ireland, and Bulgaria.
Haaretz released photos of the Palestinian men leaving the plane on the tarmac of Ben-Gurion Airport wearing prison-issued tracksuits and carrying their few belongings in plastic bags.
The Guardian report stated that this was part of a secret operation to deport the eight men to the West Bank after they were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Gil Dezer is an Israeli-American, Miami-based real estate mogul and a close friend of Donald Trump Jr. According to his official website, he oversaw the development of six Trump-branded buildings between 2009 and 2010.
His private plane was chartered by ICE through Journey Aviation. The report noted that public records show that the Florida-based company is frequently contracted by US agencies to charter private jets.
These flights are among a list of several instances in which Dezer’s jet, which he described as his “favourite toy,” was used to deport people from the US. According to Human Rights First (HRF), Dezer’s plane made four “removal flights” to Kenya, Liberia, Guinea, and Eswatini since October 2025.
“The only thing I’m notified about is the dates of use,” Dezer told The Guardian in an email, where he also claimed that he is not privy to the names of the people who travel on his jet.
US officials did not answer the Guardian’s questions about the cost of the two flights to Israel. However, ICE previously disclosed that flight costs have ranged from nearly $7,000 to more than $26,000 per flight hour.
This would put the flight to Israel in between $400,000 and $500,000, the report stated.
Savi Arvey, HRF’s director of research and analysis for refugee and immigrant rights, called the situation “part of an opaque system of private aircraft facilitating mass deportation,” and said that the policy has “blatantly disregarded due process, separated families, and is operated without any accountability”.
‘America was a heaven,’ says deported Palestinian
The report claimed that Israel’s assistance in the flights marked a shift in the Trump administration’s handling of deportations.
In the article, which was done in collaboration with +972 Magazine, deported Palestinian Maher Awad spoke about having to leave his home in Michigan and his son. Awad, who is originally from the West Bank, came to America as a young teenager and called it “a heaven.”
“Everything I know, everything I experienced was in the United States,” he said.
Awad was deported after he had called to report a break-in at his home. When the police arrived, they arrested him on a previous domestic assault charge. ICE agents arrested him again after he was released from jail, and he spent the next year being shuffled around different immigration facilities.
“They dropped us off like animals on the side of the road,” Awad said of his return to the West Bank. “We went to a local house, we knocked on the door, we were like: ‘Please help us out.’”
“I was shocked to see them walking towards my house and the village. The Israeli army usually doesn’t release prisoners at this checkpoint,” said Mohammad Kanaan, a university professor whose house is near the checkpoint, and recalled the moment Awad appeared in the village to The Guardian.
“They stayed at my place for only two hours. During that time, we fed them. They called their families, who either came to pick them up or arranged transportation for them,” he explained, and added, “They did not have any contact with their families for a long time. Their families considered them missing.”
Neither the Israeli Prison Service nor the Foreign Ministry commented on the matter.
The US State Department’s only comment was that it “coordinates closely with DHS on efforts to repatriate illegal aliens”.