By Sharon Zhang
This text was initially printed by Truthout
Israeli media estimates the flight price roughly $300,000.
The Trump administration chartered a personal jet owned by an Israeli American businessman to deport eight Palestinians to the occupied West Financial institution this week, new reporting says.
The Palestinians had been taken in a Gulfstream IV owned by an actual property accomplice of President Donald Trump, Haaretz experiences, and handed over to Israeli Jail Service officers by U.S. legislation enforcement. Israeli officers then transported them to a checkpoint by an unlawful settlement within the occupied West Financial institution, the place they had been launched.
The Israeli outlet says that footage exhibits one of many deported Palestinians exiting the airplane together with his arms in cuffs, with Israeli safety personnel awaiting him on the backside of the steps.
The case was described as “extremely uncommon,” and is estimated to have price roughly $300,000, based mostly in the marketplace price of chartering a personal jet of about $15,000 per hour in flight. The airplane reportedly took off from New York, and stopped twice for refueling, in Eire and Bulgaria, earlier than touchdown at Israel’s Ben-Gurion Worldwide Airport on Wednesday.
Sources advised Haaretz that the deportation to the West Financial institution got here at particular request of U.S. officers to Israeli officers. One supply stated the request was honored after Israeli officers “decided that the deportees had no safety background.”
U.S. officers claimed that the Palestinians had been within the U.S. illegally, although Haaretz doesn’t establish its sources, and the Trump administration has swept up numerous authorized residents in its immigration raids.
The Division of Homeland Safety has focused Palestinians and pro-Palestine activists in its sweeping crackdown on immigrants. It’s at the moment within the technique of making an attempt to deport Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil to Algeria, and has beforehand tried to focus on different pro-Palestine advocates with visa revocations and different actions. Quite a few pro-Israel teams have additionally aided within the administration’s marketing campaign in opposition to pro-Palestine activists.
The id of the jet proprietor is unclear. Nonetheless, experiences have beforehand discovered that the Trump administration has used an Israeli-owned jet to deport immigrants.
Zeteo reported in October {that a} Gulfstream IV jet owned by an Israeli American billionaire household with shut ties to President Donald Trump appeared to have been used to fly 10 immigrants from Louisiana to Eswatini, a small nation in southern Africa. The jet is owned by Michael Dezer and his household by way of a shell firm, the outlet reported; the Dezers and their household agency, Dezer Improvement, have long-held ties to Trump, serving to him develop the concept of Trump-branded properties in Florida within the Nineteen Nineties.
Analysts aligned publicly accessible flight information of an plane taking off from Alexandria, Louisiana, the place many Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities are positioned, and touchdown in Eswatini, together with experiences of the nation receiving deportees. On the time, the nation’s authorities confirmed that it was receiving the deportees, and would maintain them in detention till they could possibly be taken to their international locations of origin.
Human Rights Watch has discovered that the nation has an settlement with the U.S. to take as much as 160 folks in alternate for $5.1 million.
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