Pretoria halts visa waiver for Palestinians after Gaza flights

The incident underscored the gap between South Africa’s fierce anti-Israel diplomacy and its treatment of Palestinians seeking refuge from war-torn Gaza.

By Etgar Lefkovits, JNS

South Africa has withdrawn its 90-day visa exemption for Palestinian Authority passport holders over concern the longstanding policy was being used to relocate Gazans, the country’s Department of Home Affairs announced on Saturday.

The move came less than a month after a chartered plane landed in Johannesburg with more than 150 Palestinians from Gaza, unsettling South African authorities, who kept the passengers onboard on the tarmac for around 12 hours before allowing them to disembark.

The South African department cited “deliberate and ongoing abuse” of the visa exemption for Palestinian holders “by Israeli actors linked to ‘voluntary emigration’ efforts for residents of the Gaza Strip.”

The treatment of the passengers on the November charter flight badly embarrassed South Africa’s ANC-led government, which has long been among Israel’s harshest critics in the world.

The announcement of the visa waiver revocation said that two charter flights, on Oct. 28 and Nov. 13, were found to be in “systematic abuse of the short stay exemption, with travel designed not for the purposes of tourism or short-stays as intended, but to relocate Palestinians from Gaza.

“Withdrawing the visa exemption is the most effective way to prevent further flights of this nature, while ensuring that bona fide travelers from Palestine are safely able to visit South Africa without being subjected to abuse,” South African Minister of Home Affairs Leon Schreiber said.

“South Africa will not be complicit in any scheme to exploit or displace Palestinians from Gaza.”

The decision comes after the South African government’s initial refusal to allow the passengers off the plane provoked strong criticism from nongovernmental organizations.

South African authorities eventually granted 90-day visas to some 130 of the 153 arrivals. The others continued to other destinations, according to South Africa’s Border Management Authority.

The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the Israeli security body managing movement in and out of Gaza, said that the passengers had flown via Ramon Airport in southern Israel to South Africa, stopping in Nairobi, Kenya, “only after a third country had formally agreed to accept them.”

The incident highlighted a disconnect between South Africa’s openly hostile anti-Israel foreign policy, which peaked when it led an international case against Israel at the United Nations’ International Court of Justice on charges of genocide, and Pretoria’s behavior toward ordinary Palestinians seeking a refuge from war-ravaged Gaza after two years of violence.