Johannesburg, South Africa — The crowd erupted in thunderous applause as Dr Imtiaz Sooliman ascended the stage, dressed in his signature dark green T-shirt emblazoned with South Africa’s flag and the name of his organisation, Gift of the Givers.
The humanitarian had been invited to Cape Town’s Sea Point promenade in October for a rally in support of Palestine, to give protesters enraged about Israel’s genocide in Gaza an update on his aid agency’s work in the war-torn enclave.
He quickly got fired up, sharing how his team in Gaza had lost family members during the Israeli assault and how the fight for justice for Palestinians has been a 75-year struggle.
“Every time we protested, the Zionists were too clever; they were arrogant, acted with impunity. They put fear in corporations, in universities … in government,” he said, adding that they lobbed accusations of anti-Semitism in response to any criticism of Israel. “Well, I’ve got a new message for them: find a new narrative. That is dull, boring and stupid,” he added.
The large crowd erupted into more cheers and applause.
Sooliman, a trained medical doctor who has opted not to practise any more, is a natural at firing up large crowds, his passion for justice and humanitarianism evident.
Behind closed doors, the 62-year-old is focused and meticulous – starting his days early, and engaging in every step of the work his organisation is involved in, even drafting social media posts for his teams to share.
Three decades ago, he founded Gift of the Givers after a spiritual trip to Turkiye inspired him to give back. The foundation has since grown to become South Africa’s most prominent aid agency, responding to crises both locally and abroad.
Despite the organisation’s footprint and wide range of accolades, Sooliman has found himself in Zionist crosshairs for criticising Israel’s actions in Gaza since the war began in October 2023.
But to Sooliman, his philosophy is straightforward: human need transcends political affiliation.
“I don’t mince my words. Because I don’t look at conflicts from a political point of view. I look at it from the humanitarian point of view,” the outspoken doctor told Al Jazeera from his home in Pietermaritzburg in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province.
Gift of the Givers
The Gift of the Givers Foundation started in Pietermaritzburg in 1992, soon extending its work across the country, the continent and further afield. The organisation now employs 600 people, with offices in nine countries, including Somalia, Yemen and Palestine.
According to records, Gift of the Givers has distributed 6 billion South African rand ($319m) in aid across 47 countries in 32 years. The organisation is widely funded by big South African corporations and small private donors, it said.
While the NGO responds to catastrophic disasters – including tsunamis, earthquakes and war – at home it still addresses myriad smaller crises plaguing local communities, often stepping in when government cannot.
Recently, in South Africa’s arid Karoo region, Sooliman and his team were immersed in preparations for the inauguration of a containerised kitchen in Touws River, a small railway town where the vast majority of the 8,000 residents grapple with life below the poverty line.
Sooliman spoke to Al Jazeera while handling logistics and drafting a press release for the event in anticipation of the launch of a feeding centre desperately needed in the community.
Most Touws River residents survive on paltry government grants, and eight out of 10 people are unemployed. Every day, hundreds of children queue to have what is often their only hot meal.
In the midst of that, fires also ravaged the Western Cape province, prompting another urgent call for intervention by Gift of the Givers. Meanwhile, warm meals were being prepared and distributed to people stuck at the South African border with Mozambique amid persisting post-election violence.
At the same time in Syria, teams were preparing to open a refuge centre for women and children while others distributed food to the poor in the days after the collapse of the Bashar al-Assad regime.
Accusations and support
Sooliman’s life is a whirlwind of crises, and the practical work takes centre stage. But he does not shy away from calling out injustices where he sees them.
His organisation has worked to help people in the occupied Palestinian territory for decades. But when Israel bombed the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza in the early days of the war, he publicly called out the Israeli government’s actions in a series of media interviews in South Africa.
He also called the situation in Gaza in the first weeks of the war “bloody dangerous” and “the worst situation in the world because there is no exit”.
“I went berserk,” he told Al Jazeera.
He was prepared for a backlash. The onslaught he soon faced from local pro-Israeli groups involved accusations — with no supporting evidence — that he was funding “terror groups” and harbouring an “Islamist agenda”. Sooliman has rubbished those claims.
His detractors sought to have banks clamp down on Gift of the Givers and investigate their funding amid an apparent campaign on social media to discredit him.
Lawrence Nowosenetz, a former member of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, a local Zionist lobby group, petitioned the NGO Helen Suzman Foundation, whose patron was Jewish, to prevent Sooliman from delivering an annual lecture last year.
“The likelihood that donor funding in Gaza was used exclusively to provide humanitarian relief for innocent civilians is remote,” Nowosenetz wrote, claiming without evidence that it is “likely” some Gift of the Givers resources went into supporting Hamas.
Op-ed pieces in The Times of Israel accused Sooliman of nefarious links to Iran, which he has denied. Well-known, right-leaning South African musician David “The Kifness” Scott claimed on X that Sooliman was “a radical Islamist under the guise of a humanitarian” — again, without evidence.
The allegations did not stick and backfired with an avalanche of support for Sooliman, with government ministers, religious leaders, activists and business leaders expressing support for the work Gift of the Givers does. The Helen Suzman Foundation stood by its decision to have Sooliman deliver its annual memorial lecture, which he did in November.
Everyday people also took to social media to push back against Sooliman’s critics.
“Those people are forever helping out. When the farmers were suffering a drought, white Afrikaans Christian farmers … these Gift of the Givers people were sorting them out with water,” a white Afrikaner man, who identifies as TheUprightMan on TikTok, said, defending Gift of the Givers amid a flurry of racist comments.
“When the hurricane struck in KZN, it was them. Whenever there are people in need, these people from Gift of the Givers pitch up and they offer their services to anyone. Not just Muslim people,” he told his 18,000 followers on TikTok. KZN is an abbreviation of KwaZulu-Natal, the second most populous province in South Africa.
Disinformation campaign
The crusade against Sooliman has since gone quiet. But veteran South African journalist Ferial Haffajee, commenting on the campaign, said she had observed a troubling trend since South Africa took a stand against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ): many prominent South Africans have faced vicious attacks.
“Many people who did that experienced hardship, disinformation campaigns, and even the loss of their jobs. In that context, there has been an effort to besmirch the name of Dr Imtiaz Sooliman,” she said, adding that “they picked on the wrong guy. He is a complete local hero and a global icon. ”
Sooliman said he believes the campaign to discredit him was an effort to send a chilling message to anyone who opposed the Israeli government and its supporters.
“If they could take on the biggest organisation in South Africa that has the most respect and break you down, it sends a message to other people to not stand against them. It was to send a message to other people. It was to block my funding,” he said.
He was hardly bothered by the noise, confidently saying he knew that “they would fail”.
Sooliman also noted that, ironically, while the campaign against him tried to make false links between him and Hamas, during his years of work in Palestine, he butted heads with the Gaza group as well.
On an initial visit to Palestine in 2002, Sooliman said he may have upset the Hamas leadership when he called for Palestinian unity if ever the country were to achieve liberation the way South Africa did from apartheid.
“I don’t think they were too happy with me,” he told Al Jazeera.
At the time, he was on an aid mission delivering medical supplies to the occupied West Bank and meeting Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. It took his organisation 12 weeks to circumvent Israeli government obstructions and for the aid to be delivered.
He remembers also upsetting other regional groups.
Once, he referred to the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah as “Hebushaitain” (the group of Satan) after they targeted a hospital Gift of the Givers was working in in northern Syria, while also contending with the Free Syrian Army there during the country’s civil war.
In Somalia, during an aid trip in the early 2000s, Sooliman told the armed group al-Shabab, which was curious about his activities in the area, that he was not there to take political sides but to help the victims of the conflict. “They let us do our work,” he said.
Armed groups have allowed the work of Gift of the Givers to continue on the understanding that “we are not here to choose sides”, he said, calling his neutral and impartial approach his “recipe for success” on the work front.
‘Sincerity’ and solidarity
Meanwhile, on the personal front, Sooliman hardly takes holidays and remains intimately involved in every aspect of his organisation’s work, regardless of scale.
“Whatever we do, we supervise it fully. I get involved. Most of my time goes to looking after projects. I know no other life. I have been doing this for 32 years,” he said.
Sooliman had more than 200 public engagements scheduled for 2024 – toggling between projects, public events, protest rallies, corporate events, fundraising and official government functions.
“My daughter says I live on a plane,” he joked.
He recalled that on the day of her wedding in December 2010, he had to rush away from the festivities to urgently respond to floods in Soweto, south of Johannesburg.
“My house was full of guests, I had to get back to work. ”
Each time his family persuades him to take a well-deserved break, a national disaster seems to erupt, thwarting his plans. “Disaster business is 365 days a year,” he joked.
His efforts have fostered support from diverse religious and cultural groups, as well as civil society, journalists and the public.
“There’s a lot of sincerity behind his actions. This sincerity touches the hearts of people. It attracts support and fosters love,” Azhar Vadi, the head of Johannesburg-based nonprofit Salaam Foundation, another player in the local aid sector, said of Sooliman.
For journalist Haffejee, Gift of the Givers’ solidarity “spans east to west, north to south”. The organisation “is my marker of what is good in the world and in this country”, she said.
Since Sooliman’s first aid trip to Palestine in 2002, his group has steadily increased its outreaches there. In 2009, Gift of the Givers responded to calls for medical assistance after Israel targeted besieged Gaza for three weeks. Sooliman led an aid mission at the time, and again when the 2014 war in Gaza happened.
Since the genocide began in 2023, he has offered assistance, including facilitating $250,000 in medical equipment to Gaza, which was sponsored by Aspen South Africa, and working to upgrade the al-Shifa Hospital; setting up bakeries and helping with desalination plants. The foundation also helps Palestinian refugee families now in Egypt, and supports medical students completing their studies in South Africa.
At the same time, Sooliman has spoken out for Palestinian justice, including doubling down on calls for the war to end and urging Israel to release the head of the Kamal Adwan Hospital, Dr Hussam Abu Safia.
Despite concerns that the organisation’s other work may get affected by his outspoken stance on Palestine, Sooliman is determined not to back down – and says it is an approach that has maybe even helped them.
“People were calling, saying ‘What about corporate funding? ’. I said, ‘What about corporates? God funds the corporates; he can take it away whenever he wants. ’
