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Palestinian travellers who arrived at OR Tambo International Airport.
The South African Zionist Federation has categorically rejected as torrent and baseless accusations surrounding the group of Palestinians initially denied entry at Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport on Thursday.
The Federation says politicians and the media repeated the inflammatory claim that Israel “deliberately” withheld passport stamps to sabotage asylum seekers.
The Federation calls it a toxic narrative that did not appear spontaneously but was repeated by the Gift of the Givers’ Imtiaz Sooliman.
In a statement, the Federation says Israel abolished physical passport stamps for all foreign visitors more than a decade ago, replacing them with a standard electronic entry or exit slip and that every traveller receives this slip, without exception
On Thursday, the Border Management Authority (BMA) initially denied entry to 153 Palestinians due to incomplete documentation.
According to the BMA, the Palestinian passengers were not allowed to disembark from the aircraft as they did not have the customary departure stamps in their passports.
The passengers also did not indicate how long they intended to stay in the country or the address of their accommodation.
The passengers were later allowed to disembark after nearly 12 hours on the tarmac. This after Home Affairs received a commitment from the Gift of the Givers that it will provide the passengers with accommodation during their stay in South Africa.
VIDEO | 153 refugees have been allowed to enter SA:
Sooliman says that most of the Gaza refugees didn’t even know where they were going, and they had no exit stamp.
“This, unfortunately, sounds like something very sinister. This is not the first flight; it’s the second flight. This seems to be a coordinated effort from Israel to carry out a process of ethnic cleansing. People pay a high price to front organisations of Israel and are then taken out of Gaza, moved to Shalom and to the Ramon military base and flown from there to different countries. Most of them on the first plane didn’t even know where they were going and then of course, there was no exit stamp and when they get to a foreign country, they are further embarrassed and further put into difficulty, like what happened in South Africa.”
VIDEO |Palestinian refugees arrive in SA- Dr Imtiaz Sooliman:
