‘Profound despair’ driving Palestinians to seek a safe haven outside Gaza

The controversial transfer of Palestinians on a flight to South Africa is not a “random event” but rather “a new face of ethnic cleansing”, Oroub el-Abed, an associate professor in international migration and refugee studies in the West Bank, has told Al Jazeera. “This is very much part of a long colonial pattern, a very systematic dispossession of Indigenous Palestinians that has been perpetuated by Zionist Israelis who want to empty the land of its Indigenous people, using multifaceted approaches,” el-Abed said.