Revealed: private jet owned by Trump friend used by ICE to deport Palestinians to West Bank [View all]
Source: The Guardian
Thu 5 Feb 2026 12.30 EST
Last modified on Thu 5 Feb 2026 15.15 EST
On the morning of 21 January, Israeli authorities left eight Palestinian men at a West Bank checkpoint. Disoriented and cold, they were dressed in prison-issued tracksuits and carried their few belongings in plastic bags. Hours earlier, they had been sitting with their wrists and ankles shackled on the plush leather seats of a private jet owned by the Florida property tycoon Gil Dezer, a longtime business partner of Donald Trump.
Dezer is also a Trump donor, friend of Donald Trump Jr and member of the Miami branch of Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. His sleek Gulfstream jet – which he has called “my little rocket ship” – was used to transport the men from an airport near a notorious removal centre in Arizona to Tel Aviv. The jet made three refuelling stops en route: in New Jersey, Ireland and Bulgaria.
A Guardian investigation has established the flight was part of a secretive and politically sensitive US government operation to deport Palestinians arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the Israeli-occupied West Bank. One of those deported on the January flight was Maher Awad, a 24-year-old originally from the West Bank, who had lived in the US for nearly a decade.
Speaking to the Guardian in the town of Rammun, Maher shared photos of his girlfriend and newborn son in Michigan. Awad is one of several men onboard two recent flights who have been identified by the Guardian and the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine. “I grew up in America,” he said. “America was heaven for me.” On Monday this week, Dezer’s 16-passenger luxury jet was used a second time to transport another group of Palestinian deportees.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/05/revealed-private-jet-owned-by-trump-friend-used-by-ice-to-deport-palestinians-to-west-bank
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