IN SHORT: When a plane carrying over 150 Palestinians landed in South Africa in November 2025, the Gift of the Givers disaster response organisation offered to assist the group. Shortly after, several social media users posted a quote attributed to the NGO’s founder Imtiaz Sooliman, saying he followed Islamic law and “Islamic law overrides any other law”. The accuracy of the quote has been disputed, but it is what Sooliman said.
On 13 November 2025, a plane carrying over 150 Palestinians landed at the OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg in South Africa’s Gauteng province.
According to the South African government, the group came from Gaza in Palestine and had made a stop in Nairobi, Kenya before landing in Johannesburg.
The group has been allowed to remain in the country, after Gift of the Givers led efforts to provide humanitarian assistance and shelter.
Gift of the Givers is a South African non-governmental organisation founded by Imtiaz Sooliman. It provides humanitarian aid in disaster and war-stricken countries and has been called South Africa’s most prominent aid agency.
South African authorities said the Palestinians were carrying passports that didn’t have the customary departure stamps, and Sooliman blamed Israel for this.
Shortly after Sooliman’s several media interviews on the matter, South African singer David Scott, often known by his stage name The Kiffness, posted a quote on X, attributed to Sooliman.
This is not the first time Scott has attacked Sooliman or courted controversy. In November 2024 he called Sooliman a “false prophet” and “radical Islamist” on the social media platform X. In September 2025 Scott again made the news, first praising the assassinated US right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and later alleging he lost lucrative business over this.
The quote Scott attributed to Sooliman reads: “I don’t need permission from anybody in the world to tell me what to do. I break the laws all the time. I follow Islamic law, and Islamic law overrides any other law.”
Scott’s post received over 162,000 views and more than 1,000 reposts.
Many social media users who reposted it questioned Sooliman’s motives in accommodating the Palestinians, implying that he was used to breaking South African laws and was doing it once again by accommodating the Palestinians.
As the quote started circulating, subscribers to Africa Check’s WhatsApp lines asked us to investigate whether Sooliman said the words attributed to him. Meta’s fact-checking system also flagged it as potentially false.
Israel and Palestine – and South Africa
Israel and Palestine have been in violent conflict for decades. The current crisis began after Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza on 7 October 2023, killing around 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, and taking a reported 251 as hostages.
The Gaza Strip is a small Palestinian territory wedged between Israel and the eastern Mediterranean sea.
Israel subsequently waged war against Gaza and to date has killed over 69,000 Palestinians, including at least 20,179 children.
The first phase of a ceasefire, put forward by the United States, was finally agreed to between Israel and Hamas on 10 October 2025. But the peace is fragile, and as of 25 November, 342 Palestinians had been reportedly killed by Israeli forces and nearly 900 injured since the start of the ceasefire.
South Africa has long supported the Palestinian people. The African National Congress (ANC), the country’s largest political party, has been particularly vocal, drawing parallels between Israeli oppression of Palestinians and the South African system of apartheid.
In the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza, South Africa brought a case against Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the judicial arm of the United Nations that aims to settle disputes between states. South Africa submitted that Israel’s conduct in Gaza was “in violation of its obligations under the Genocide Convention”, which obliges member states to prevent or punish the crime of genocide. Genocide includes “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group”.
It may take years for the ICJ to deliver its final verdict. A number of other countries, including Brazil, Spain, Ireland, Mexico and Turkiye, have joined South Africa in the case against Israel since it was first brought to the court.
Yes, Sooliman said it
Some of the posts quoting Sooliman mentioned that he made the statement during a 7 October 2024 interview. We searched the social media accounts of Gift of the Givers for any interviews from around that time and found this post on Instagram from that date.
The post said Sooliman would “mark the one-year anniversary of the start of the genocide in Gaza" with a “reflective interview”. The interview, titled The Price for Freedom, would air on the Islamic channel Hilaal TV.
We used keywords to search for the full interview on YouTube and found it. It was posted on Hilaal TV’s YouTube channel on the same day. In it, Sooliman was asked: “As a humanitarian, you have to deal with the different hierarchies of people, organisations and leaders … and as a South African who has experienced apartheid and knows without a measure of doubt that Israel certainly is an apartheid state. Why did you not behave like the liberals who say we have to be neutral?”
In his response, from the 8:45 mark, Sooliman says: “First of all, I don’t follow international law or human law … I don’t need permission from anybody in the world to tell me what to do. I break the laws all the time … I follow Islamic law, and Islamic law overrides any other law.”
He went on to say it was important to fight against the injustices of this world and that it was people within states, not the states themselves, that were committing injustices.
As Africa Check has frequently cautioned readers, you should tread carefully around online posts or viral messages that leave you shocked or angry. Strong emotions are often manipulated by those wishing to spread misinformation. But in this case, the claim is true. Sooliman did make the statement attributed to him, and said that “Islamic law overrides any other law”.
Listen to this fact-check in isiZulu courtesy of AmaFacts ayaVUMA on Vuma FM, Mondays at 20h30.
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