Thread by @HamasAtrocities

For four years, Mossad ran a fake hotel — and no one suspected a thing.

During the day, they served cocktails to tourists. At night, they loaded their T-56 rifles and smuggled refugees past enemy soldiers.

An incredible story!🧵👇

Imagine this: You're on vacation in a luxurious resort on the Red Sea. The hotel manager is charming and attentive. Waiters bring you perfectly mixed drinks. Diving instructors take you to breathtaking coral reefs. You eat, swim, and relax under endless blue skies.

You never suspect that the waiter serving you breakfast has a gun hidden under his uniform. You don't know that your diving instructor is one of the world's deadliest commandos. You certainly don't realize that they spend their nights smuggling people across borders.

In the 1980s, the Mossad carried out one of the most audacious covert missions in the history of espionage.

The operation was called "Brothers".

The story begins in the early 1980s. Thousands of Ethiopian Jews were fleeing famine and a brutal civil war...

walking hundreds of kilometers to refugee camps in neighboring Sudan.
They were dying in desperate conditions — disease, starvation, violence. Israel wanted to save them.

But there was a terrible problem: Sudan was a member of the Arab League and a hostile enemy of Israel

Any Israeli caught in Sudan risked immediate execution. Any Mossad agent discovered there would have sparked an international crisis.

So how do you evacuate thousands of refugees from the heart of enemy territory without anyone noticing?

Mossad had a crazy idea!

Israel discovered an abandoned Italian tourist complex on the Sudanese coast of the Red Sea — a place called Arous Village. It had been partially built and then abandoned, left to rot for years under the desert sun. No one used it. No one cared.

Mossad's plan was insane: rent the hotel, renovate it, run it as a real diving resort, attract real European tourists — and use it as a cover to smuggle refugees out at night.

They would build a rescue network within a functioning business, right under the noses of the Sudanese

The operation began immediately. Mossad created a fake Swiss tourism company with elaborate documentation. They paid Sudanese officials hundreds of thousands of dollars in "licensing fees" (bribes) and secured a three-year lease for Arous Village.

Then the real work began.

Mossad sent some of their elite agents — combat veterans, special forces soldiers, intelligence officers — to Sudan disguised as hotel staff. They renovated the resort, installed electricity and water, furnished the rooms, stocked the bars, and hired local staff for basic tasks.

They even printed thousands of glossy brochures advertising their "Red Sea diving paradise" and distributed them across Europe. "Experience the pristine beauty of Sudan's coral reefs. Luxury accommodations. Expert diving instructors. Book your adventure today!"

And then something completely unexpected happened: people actually came.

European tourists — Germans, French, Brits — started booking vacations at Arous Village. Wealthy travelers seeking exotic diving destinations found this boutique resort perfect.

The Mossad agents suddenly found themselves with a huge new problem: they were no longer just running a fake hotel as a cover — they were running a real hotel with real guests who expected real service.

So Israel's most lethal operatives learned to make beds. To cook European cuisine. To mix cocktails. To teach scuba diving. To smile and chat with tourists about their travels.

By day, they were overqualified hotel staff.

By night, they returned to who they really were.

When tourists fell asleep in their rooms, the "waiters" and "diving instructors" retrieved weapons hidden under beds and in loose floorboards. They grabbed satellite phones, night-vision goggles, encrypted radios. They climbed into trucks and drove into the pitch-black desert.

Hundreds of miles from the coast, hidden in camps in the wilderness, Ethiopian Jewish refugees waited in groups of 50-100 people. Mossad agents loaded them into trucks, covered them with tarpaulins, and drove them back to the deserted beach of Arous Village.

There, Israeli Navy commandos arrived in Zodiac inflatable boats, rowing silently in the darkness. They ferried the refugees to waiting Israeli military ships beyond territorial waters. The ships then took them to Israel.

At dawn, the commandos had erased all traces, put on their hotel uniforms again, and were serving breakfast to tourists who had no idea what had happened while they slept.

This went on for four years.

The operation evacuated about 6,000-8,000 Ethiopian Jews from Sudan to Israel. Entire families were saved. Children who would have died in refugee camps now grew up safely. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren exist today because Mossad agents lived a double life for four years

It ended suddenly in 1985. The Sudanese government changed with a coup. The new regime began to suspect the "European hotel operators" of Arous Village. Intelligence reports suggested they were asking questions.
Mossad headquarters sent emergency orders: evacuate immediately.

On the last night, the hotel was full of tourists. The agents slipped away silently after sunset, without tickets, without explanations, without contact addresses. They drove to a desert airstrip where Israeli Air Force C-130 Hercules transport planes landed in the darkness.

By morning, they were gone.
The tourists woke up to find the entire hotel staff had vanished during the night. The manager, waiters, diving instructors, maintenance workers — all gone. The rooms were clean, the breakfast ingredients ready, but there was no one to serve them.

The Europeans were stunned. The local Sudanese workers were confused. The government eventually figured out what had happened — but too late to do anything about it.
At that point, the Mossad agents had returned to Israel.

Thousands of rescued refugees were starting new lives, and Operation Brothers had become a legend in the world of espionage.

Today, many Israelis of Ethiopian origin don't even know that their parents or grandparents came to Israel through "the hotel". Operation Brothers remained a secret for decades. When the story finally emerged, it seemed like fiction.
But every word is true.