On Sept. 9, 1969, around 20 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip boarded a plane at an airport in central Israel, believing they were bound for Brazil. They had signed up through an Israeli travel agency for a work-abroad program, with the promise of higher wages than they could find in Gaza, which Israel had occupied two years earlier. Those with families were assured that their wives and children would be able to join them in Brazil soon after. But that is not what transpired.
When the flight touched down in São Paulo, armed guards escorted the men onto another, smaller plane that brought them to Asunción, the capital of Paraguay — a country many of them had never even heard of, and which was then under the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner. There, they were greeted by armed police officers and driven to a hotel for the night.
Disoriented and suspicious, they were told not to worry: The next morning, government officials would issue identification papers and get them set up for work. When those officials arrived, however, they arbitrarily assigned the men new professions to inscribe on their ID cards, then sent them on a bus to a far-flung rural area.
That was the last contact the Palestinians would have with any authority connected to the work program, because it did not exist. They had been tricked into boarding a deportation flight by the Mossad, Israel’s covert intelligence agency, as part of a secret scheme to exile Palestinians from the Gaza Strip en masse.
Stranded in a country whose language they did not speak, the new arrivals found themselves with no money, no housing, no jobs, no connections, and no way of getting back home. And they soon realized that they were not the first to have been lured and abandoned in this way; nor would they be the last.
For decades, knowledge of this secret operation remained largely confined to the families of the men subjected to it. But a new podcast series, based on the testimonies of two deportees and evidence from Israeli and Paraguayan archives, sets out to uncover a story that Israel long sought to suppress, and explain why it was aborted only months after it began.
After two and half years in which Israel has attempted, through various means, to eradicate Palestinian presence in Gaza altogether, the echoes of history could hardly be louder.
A tale of two deportees
Created by managing producer Maxim Saakyan and coproducers Nadeen Shaker and Nada El-Kouny, the four-part series “Palestinians in Paraguay” from Uncovering Roots builds on research by Hadeel Assali, a postdoctoral scholar at Columbia University, and John Tofik Karam, a historian at the University of Illinois, both of whom feature in the episodes.
At its center are the testimonies of two men deported under what became known as the Paraguay Scheme: Mahmoud Yousef, Assali’s great uncle (who died in Amman in 2021, but whose recollections Assali recorded prior to his death); and Talal Al-Dimassi, who is still alive and, remarkably, still living in Paraguay.
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The two share similar origins. Both were born in refugee camps in Egypt shortly after their families were displaced during the Nakba of 1948. Both subsequently moved to Gaza, then under Egyptian administration, where they grew up in Al-Maghazi camp.
They were on the cusp of adulthood when Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967, and it was not long before they each encountered the covert deportation scheme masquerading as a work abroad program, ostensibly organized by a travel agency called Patra. Yousef was enticed by the promise of high wages — he recalls being offered around $3,000 a month for a year or two, after which he would return to Gaza. Al-Dimassi, who had already been arrested and tortured by the Israeli army because of his past involvement with armed resistance groups, was given an ultimatum: He could sign up for the program, or his entire family would be expelled.
To this day, the number of Palestinians deported under the Paraguay Scheme remains a mystery, with estimates ranging from a few dozen to several thousand. Where in the world they ended up is anyone’s guess. But a document discovered by an acquaintance of Assali’s in the Israeli State Archives — a record of a government committee meeting in May 1969 — tells us exactly how many Gazans Israel’s leaders intended to expel.
“It is hereby decided to approve the Mossad proposal regarding the emigration of 60,000 from the administered territories to Paraguay,” the document states, adding that Israel would pay the Paraguayan government a fee of $33 per deportee, including an advance of $350,000 for the first 10,000.
Today, Gaza is home to over 2 million people. But at the time, the population numbered less than 400,000. The Paraguay Scheme, designed in particular to lure Gaza’s young men, therefore aimed to disappear an enormous proportion of the Strip’s male youth — yet only a few flights ever took off. So why was the program terminated?
Forced into survival mode, many deportees left Paraguay within weeks of arriving, crossing on foot into neighboring Brazil, Bolivia, or Argentina. Yousef quickly learned Spanish and found work trading textiles across the borders, eventually connecting with the Palestinian diaspora in Chile. Al-Dimassi peddled clothes door-to-door in the Paraguayan countryside, until one day he was robbed at knifepoint. For him, that was the final straw.
Utterly desperate and feeling like they had nothing left to lose, Al-Dimassi and another deportee, Khaled Kassab, acquired old guns and returned to Asunción to directly confront Israel’s ambassador to Paraguay, Benjamin Weiser Varon.
On May 4, 1970, they arrived at the embassy and demanded to speak to Varon. Embassy guards told them he was not there; suspecting this to be a lie, they forced their way inside. The guards drew their weapons and a firefight erupted.
In the melee, the Palestinians spotted Varon and fired several shots. One hit the ambassador in the back, wounding him. Another killed his secretary, Edna Peer. (Both Al-Dimassi and Kassab later denied firing the shots; Al-Dimassi said it was Kassab, who said it was a third man that had accompanied them.)
The shooting made headlines across South America and around the world. Initial reports made no mention of the men’s deportation from Gaza, instead portraying the incident as an assassination attempt orchestrated by the Palestine Liberation Organization. But that narrative would soon be challenged.
Over the course of a public trial that spanned two years, Kassab and Al-Dimassi used the courtroom to tell the world what had happened to them, tearing away the veil of secrecy on which the Paraguay Scheme depended. With their bullets, they effectively brought the program to an end.
The Paraguayan judge eventually found the two men guilty of murder and sentenced both to 13 years in prison, of which they served eight. According to Al-Dimassi, Israel attempted to assassinate him several times inside prison (including, he says, with a poisoned cake), forcing him to go into a form of witness protection for around a decade after his release. But he does not regret his actions.
“I saved 60,000 Palestinians who were going to be expelled to Paraguay,” he says in the podcast. “They remained there, in our homeland.”
Involuntary emigration
Since the early days of Zionism, the movement’s leaders have endeavored to maximize the amount of land under their control while minimizing the number of Palestinians living on it. This thread can be traced through decades of Israeli policy — most notably with the expulsion of around 750,000 Palestinians from what became the State of Israel during the Nakba of 1948, and a further 300,000 from the West Bank and Gaza in the Naksa of 1967.
Still, the 1967 War resulted in Israel absorbing an additional 1 million Palestinians into its newly expanded borders. Almost immediately, senior officials in the ruling Labor government began discussing how to get rid of as many of them as possible. (“I want them all to go, even if they go to the moon,” Prime Minister Levi Eshkol is reported to have said in one such meeting.) Enter the Paraguay Scheme.
Israel has never formally acknowledged the program’s existence. But in 2004, several former officials with direct knowledge of it went on the record, confirming that it had been government policy. “We made an attempt to encourage voluntary emigration,” Meir Amit, who directed the Mossad at the start of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, told the Israeli newspaper Makor Rishon. “The point was to thin the area as much as possible of Arabs.”
For decades, those involved were sworn to secrecy. According to Moshe Peer, the widower of Edna who was killed in the 1970 shooting, a Mossad agent visited him after her death and instructed him not to speak about it for 30 years. But even today, after details of the scheme have been made public, there is still an official policy of silence.
A short tribute to Peer that appeared on the government’s website last year for Memorial Day made no mention of the circumstances of her killing, attributing it simply to “Palestinian terrorists” from Gaza. And when the podcast’s producers approached Patra, the travel agency that acted as a front for the scheme and which still operates in Tel Aviv, its CEO Reem Greiver (whose father, Gad, led the company at the time) denied that the agency had played any role in the organized transfer of Palestinians.
There are several possible reasons for maintaining this policy of silence, but a significant one is likely the fact that Israel’s efforts to expel Palestinians from Gaza, via means both covert and overt, never ceased — as the past two and a half years have made abundantly clear.
It took less than a week after the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, for an Israeli ministry to formally recommend the forcible and permanent transfer of Gaza’s entire population across the border into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Three months later, almost a dozen cabinet ministers attended a conference organized by settler groups featuring giant maps marked with potential sites for new Jewish settlements in Gaza.
Far-right leaders, chief among them Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, revived a familiar euphemism to describe what should happen to the Strip’s Palestinians residents: “voluntary emigration.”
That rhetoric translated into military policy. Far from sticking to the official war aims of rescuing the hostages and destroying Hamas, Israel’s onslaught on Gaza quickly revealed itself to be a campaign of total obliteration. In addition to killing roughly one in every 30 Gazans and wounding one in every 14, Israel has damaged or destroyed over 90 percent of the Strip’s housing units and almost 90 percent of its water and sanitation infrastructure.
The devastation was the point, intended to preclude any possibility of dignified life for Palestinians in the enclave. In a closed-door Knesset meeting last May, Netanyahu said the army was “destroying more and more houses [so that Gazans] have nowhere to return,” with the “only obvious result” being emigration abroad.
And to a large extent, this strategy achieved its desired effect: By March 2025, more than half of Gazans polled said they would leave if given the opportunity — but Israel had sealed all the crossings.
When Donald Trump returned to the White House at the start of 2025 and proclaimed his intention to “take over” Gaza and permanently relocate its population, the Israeli government launched (or rather, relaunched) a “Voluntary Emigration Bureau” tasked with planning mass deportations. “If we remove 5,000 [Palestinians] a day, it will take a year [to expel them all],” Smotrich remarked in another Knesset meeting.
The problem, as ever, was finding somewhere that would take them. Egypt’s refusal to open its border to Palestinian refugees was unwavering, fearing becoming complicit in an act of mass ethnic cleansing. Israeli and U.S. officials spent months shopping around for any country that would be willing, at the right price, to absorb hundreds of thousands of deportees from Gaza, yet none was forthcoming.
As a result, Israel was forced back to the drawing board. Well, not quite.
Full circle
Last November, a plane carrying 153 Palestinians from Gaza departed Ramon Airport in southern Israel and touched down in Johannesburg, South Africa, via Nairobi, Kenya. This was no ordinary flight: The passengers had not known their destination, and, according to the Palestinian Embassy in South Africa, the plane arrived without prior notice or coordination.
Due to the absence of departure stamps in the passengers’ passports, as well as the fact they had no pre-arranged return tickets or accommodation, the South African border authorities prevented them from disembarking the plane for around 12 hours after landing. Eventually, the authorities allowed them off the plane “out of compassion,” and a local charity stepped in to provide temporary accommodation.
Passengers told the media that their travel had been organized by a group called Al-Majd Europe, which charged them $1,000-$3,000 per person after promising safety and medical treatment abroad through adverts online. Days later, an investigation by Haaretz traced Al-Majd back to an Israeli-Estonian businessman and revealed that its operations had been authorized by the Israeli government’s Voluntary Emigration Bureau.
The same investigation found that the Nov. 13 flight to Johannesburg was the third such journey arranged by Al-Majd: The first, last May, flew 57 Gazans to Indonesia and Malaysia via Budapest, and the second, in late October, took 150 Gazans to Johannesburg via Nairobi — the same journey as the controversial November flight, but which had not aroused the same suspicion or publicity.
That was not all. According to another investigation published earlier this month by AP, Al-Majd effectively functions as a front for the notorious Israeli far-right group Ad Kan, which last year paid for bus advertisements in Israel reading, “Victory = Voluntary emigration,” and, “This bus could be full of Gazans. Listen to Trump, let them out!”
Despite these revelations, Al-Majd is still actively recruiting Gazans for deportation flights, preying on the desperation of those who have lost everything as a result of Israel’s genocidal onslaught. In a post on X from March 5, the organization claimed to have “evacuated” a total of 1,021 Palestinians to countries including Canada and Australia, though the details of its operations remain shrouded in mystery.
Of course, with around 2 million Palestinians remaining in Gaza, Israel’s attempt to “thin” the population — at least by the standards of those overseeing it — has been a resounding failure. Yet the persistence of such an endeavor, employing methods so similar to the Paraguay Scheme almost six decades later, reveals the extraordinary endurance of Israel’s ambition to expunge the Palestinian people from their land, whether under the direction of the Zionist left or the Kahanist right.
At the same time, the fact that all these years later Israel is still trying and failing to expel Gazans en masse should, if anything, underscore the futility of this project. Even after a two-year military campaign designed to make the Strip utterly uninhabitable, the Palestinians remain, determined to rebuild their lives from the rubble and dust.
Israel never allowed Al-Dimassi to return to Gaza, but Gaza still returns to him in his dreams. In one of them, he recounts in the final episode of the podcast, “I found myself standing on a mountain in Gaza. On the left, I see animals eating the grass. On the right, the Palestinian flag is bellowing. I see the moon and sun at the same time. I looked up what my dream meant, and it meant that Gaza will return. One day, there will be peace.”
