A new investigative podcast uncovers a 1969 Israeli government operation to transfer thousands of Palestinians to South America.
Palestinians in Paraguay, a four-part series from the Uncovering Roots podcast, tells how the Israeli government and Mossad planned to relocate 60,000 people from Gaza to Paraguay.
The operation involved recruiting young men with what have been called false promises of work in Brazil and abandoning them in Paraguay’s capital, Asunción. Passports were confiscated and promised wages never arrived.
Talal al-Dimassi, then a teenager and now in his mid-70s, says he was detained and tortured before his deportation.
“They’d hang us up like bats, by our legs. We’d stay hanging like that for an hour and a half,” he told the podcast. Pressured to comply or risk his family being expelled, he boarded the plane and was assigned a new identity on arrival.
Paraguay’s Archive of Terror contains testimonies from at least ten men describing the same experience.
The plan collapsed on 4 May 1970 when Talal and another deportee opened fire at the Israeli embassy in Asunción, killing one person. Their trial, widely covered across Latin America as “The Palestine Case,” revealed the deportations.
“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,” Talal said.
Talal also claims in the podcast that Israel made three failed assassination attempts against him during his imprisonment, including a poisoned cake and a paid attack in his cell.
The podcast draws on declassified Israeli documents, Archive of Terror testimonies, and interviews with historian John Tofik Karam and researcher Hadeel Assali, whose relative was deported.
Karam said: “The trail of these individuals that gave their testimonies to the Paraguay police almost completely fades. And if it weren’t for the shooting in May 1970, they might have gone really unnoticed.”
A representative of the travel agency named in the testimonies denied any wrongdoing.
Palestinians in Paraguay is available on all major podcast platforms from today, Wednesday 11 March.
