Ramaphosa says Palestinians who arrived in South Africa will not be turned back

Dozens of Palestinians who arrived in South Africa on a chartered flight will not be turned back, President Cyril Ramaphosa told reporters on Friday.

South African president Cyril Ramaphosa has told reporters that 153 Palestinians who landed at O.R. Tambo international airport on Thursday on board a chartered flight were being processed and would not be turned back.

“Yesterday we had a plane carrying 160 Palestinians landing at O.R. Tambo and these are people from Gaza who somehow mysteriously were put on a plane that passed by Nairobi and came here and I got to hear about it from my Minister of Home Affairs, wanting to know what do we do now, and I said we cannot turn them back,” Ramaphosa told a media briefing in Soweto.

South African authorities faced heavy criticism Friday after they held more than 150 Palestinians, including a woman who is nine months pregnant, on a plane for around 12 hours due to complications with their travel documents.

A pastor who was allowed to meet with the passengers while they were still stuck on the plane said it was extremely hot and that children were screaming and crying.

'We must receive them'

The Palestinians landed on a charter plane at Johannesburg's O.R. Tambo International Airport on Thursday morning after a stopover in Nairobi, Kenya, South Africa's Border Management Authority said in a statement.

The Palestinian passengers did not have exit stamps from Israeli authorities, did not indicate how long they would be staying in South Africa and had not given local addresses, leading immigration authorities to deny them entry, the statement said.

“Even though they do not have the necessary documents and papers, these are people from a strife-torn, a war-torn country, and out of compassion, out of empathy, we must receive them and be able to deal with the situation that they are facing and it does seem like they were being, you know, flushed out," Ramaphosa added.

"We will get the details later, but from a humanitarian point of view, we could not return them from, hence they have come,” he said.

Asylum

The 153 passengers including families and children were allowed to leave the plane on Thursday night after South Africa's Ministry of Home Affairs intervened and a local non-governmental organisation called Gift of the Givers offered to accommodate them.

The Border Management Authority said 23 passengers had since traveled on to other countries, leaving 130 in South Africa.

Gift of the Givers founder Imtiaz Sooliman said it was the second plane carrying Palestinians to land in South Africa in the last two weeks and that the passengers themselves said they did not know where they were going.

He said both planes were believed to be carrying people from war-torn Gaza.

It was not immediately clear how the charter plane was organised, where exactly it came from and why the passengers were able to leave Israel without the proper documentation, as South African authorities claimed.

The South African pastor who was given access to the plane while it was on the tarmac told national broadcaster SABC that many of the Palestinians now intended to claim asylum in South Africa.

South Africa has long been a supporter of the Palestinian cause and the treatment of the travelers has sparked anger.