Israel’s 1969 plot to transfer 60,000 Palestinians to Paraguay uncovered by deportee

An Israeli government operation to secretly transfer thousands of Palestinians from Gaza to South America has been strikingly detailed by the deportee who exposed it while on trial for murder.

Palestinians in Paraguay, a four-part investigative audio documentary launched by the Uncovering Roots podcast Wednesday, tells the story of a Mossad plan, approved by the Israeli government in 1969, to relocate 60,000 Palestinians from Gaza to Paraguay. It bears parallels to transfers in 2025 of hundreds of people from Gaza to countries including South Africa.

Under the 1969 scheme, young men were recruited with fake promises of work in Brazil but instead abandoned in a country they’d never heard of. When they reached Paraguay’s capital Asunción, their passports were taken by travel agents and never returned. The money never came.

One of the men, Talal al-Dimassi – then a teenager and now in his mid-70s – had been detained and tortured by Israeli forces before his deportation. “They’d hang us up like bats, by our legs,” he exclusively told Palestinians in Paraguay. “We’d stay hanging like that for an hour and a half.”

Faced with a choice between joining the work scheme and having his family expelled from Gaza, he got on the aeroplane. “When we boarded that plane, it felt like something was being ripped out of my chest. The plane was climbing, and it was like my heart couldn’t follow,” he said. When he landed in Asunción, he was assigned a new identity.

Testimonies newly discovered in Paraguay’s Archive of Terror – a vast intelligence archive left behind by bloody dictator Alfredo Stroessner – record at least 10 other men describing to police the same experience: recruited by an Israeli travel agency, promised work in Brazil, and dumped in Paraguay.

The scheme unravelled on 4 May 1970, when al-Dimassi and another deportee walked into the Israeli embassy in Asunción and opened fire. One person was killed and both men were arrested. Al-Dimassi exposed the Israeli deportations at their subsequent trial, which was covered closely across Latin America and became known as “The Palestine Case”.

“I don’t regret spending 13 years in prison because I saved 60,000 Palestinians who were going to be expelled to Paraguay. They remain there. In our homeland,” al-Dimassi, who has never returned to Gaza, said in his first public interview.

In prison, Israel made three failed attempts to have al-Dimassi assassinated. One involved a poisoned birthday cake delivered to his cell. In another, a fellow prisoner was paid $1,000 to attack him with a stick while he was ironing clothes.

Palestinians in Paraguay draws on declassified Israeli state documents, the Archive of Terror testimonies, and interviews with researcher Hadeel Assali, whose great-uncle was among those deported, and historian John Tofik Karam, who first discovered the Palestinian testimonies while researching Arab immigration to South America.

“The trail of these individuals that gave their testimonies to the Paraguay police almost completely fades. And if it weren’t for the shooting that occurred in May 1970, they might have gone really unnoticed,” said Karam, director of the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies at the University of Illinois.

A representative of the Israeli travel agency named in Archive of Terror testimonies denied any illegality and described its activities as entirely legitimate.