Tourists booked a Red Sea holiday at Mossad's secret evacuation base

The beach houses at Arous offered divers a reason to travel to Sudan's Red Sea coast. They also gave Mossad a reason to be there. In the early 1980s, the agency operated the holiday resort while secretly moving Ethiopian Jews out of Sudan.

AFP's September 25, 2018 account, based on interviews with participants, described a convincing commercial front. Visitors and Sudanese authorities saw Europeans employing local residents. Behind the tourism business lay Operation Brothers. Daniel Limor, who led the mission, had spotted the abandoned resort developed by Italian entrepreneurs.

The people being evacuated had already made dangerous journeys. The Ethiopian Jewry Heritage Center describes weeks or months on foot, with hunger, thirst and deaths along the route to Sudan. Conditions in the refugee camps brought further disease and suffering. Getting to Sudan was only one stage of reaching Israel.

Ethiopian organizers were central to the next stage. A community committee identified Jews who were concealing their identity, distributed money and medicine, found hiding places and helped people reach Mossad meeting points. The center's account records this infrastructure alongside the Israeli operation, making clear how much depended on local knowledge and personal contact.

AFP reported that selected groups were collected in trucks and taken toward the coast for transfer to Israeli ships. When Sudanese soldiers opened fire during one nighttime transfer, the Israelis changed methods. Aircraft subsequently landed in the desert to collect refugees, while the holiday business continued to provide cover.

Even the refugees could not always be told who was helping them. In a separate Haaretz interview carried by Forward, former operative Gad Shimron said agents concealed their Israeli identities during transfers. His recollection gives the resort story its uncomfortable intimacy: people could entrust their escape to strangers whose real names and nationality remained secret.