The investigation is published in partnership with IRPI Media. A version in Italian can be found here.
Cyprus has been split in two since the night of 20 July 1974, when Turkish troops occupied the northern part of the island. One hundred and sixty thousand Greek Cypriots left their homes in the North, while another 45,000 Turkish Cypriots travelled the opposite way, from South to North. Since then, the island has remained divided: on one side, a member state of the European Union since 1 May 2004, with a Greek majority, and on the other, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). Ownership of the land abandoned by refugees from the northern regions has been the subject of political and judicial disputes ever since.
The “Green Line” separating Cyprus and Northern Cyprus in Nicosia, Cyprus. Picture by Julian Nyča. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0Having never developed any major industry, Cyprus’s economy lives mainly off foreign investment. The North depends on Turkey, whose government is the only one that recognises the sovereignty of the TRNC. In the South, from 2007 onwards, various schemes were created, such as golden passports and golden visas, offering benefits and incentives to attract capital from abroad. Much of that inflow of capital feeds the property market.
How golden passports ended up in Cyprus
The first programme, called “citizenship by investment”, offered voting rights in exchange for multi-million investments on the island. The programme, however, was shut down in 2020 in the wake of The Cyprus Papers Undercover, an Al Jazeera documentary that revealed how senior officials and politicians of the country were facilitating, in exchange of money, citizenship applications, by circumventing standard checks, including on criminal records. One of those officials, Demetris Syllouris, was acquitted of the charges in February 2026.
The Land Grab after the Flight from Israel
In recent years, Cyprus’s schemes have mainly attracted Chinese, Russians, Arabs and in general citizens from Western Asia. Now civil society, in the North as much as in the South, is turning its attention to Israelis. After the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, following the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, moving money to Cyprus has assumed not only an economic but also a geopolitical significance. This is indirectly confirmed by the words of Israeli President Isaac Herzog at a summit with Greece and Cyprus at the end of December 2025: “Looking ahead to Gaza and to the strategic changes in Syria and Lebanon”, he declared, “I believe Cyprus’s role is fundamental. It is a key element for the functioning and development of the region”.
Two years earlier, the first complaints about the Israeli land grab were aired by Turkish media, as it was precisely in Turkish Cyprus that the investments began. At the time, Middle East Eye wrote, Turkish-language newspapers, without disclosing their sources, estimated the number of new Israeli landowners in Cyprus at more than 35,000. Because of the island’s political sensitivity and its complex territorial disputes, the local TRNC government had already considered introducing tighter restrictions and controls on property sales to foreigners. In the spring of 2026, voices in the civil society of southern Cyprus also began to share the same fears.
Screenshot from video of Israeli President Isaac Herzog meeting Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides. Fair use.It is a fact that many Israelis are emigrating. According to a report presented on 20 October 2025 to the Immigration and Absorption Committee of the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, between the start of 2022 and August 2024 more than 192,000 Israeli citizens left the country permanently. This represented the largest loss of human capital Israel has ever recorded over such a short period. The report gives several reasons for this emigration: Israel’s political crisis, the growing influence of the Orthodox community, and the atmosphere in the aftermath of the 7 October attacks.
Even before that date, however, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched controversial judicial reforms that sparked mass street protests, thousands of people had begun buying homes abroad, fearing a period of instability.
Cyprus has certainly been one of the destinations of the exodus. Conservative Jewish media describe the island as a “displaced persons hub”. In 2018, already around 6,500 Israeli citizens lived there, not counting the historic Jewish community without dual citizenship, roughly a thousand people. In 2020, with the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the wealthy fled the strict lockdowns and a health system under pressure. Property sales soared in tourist spots in the South such as Paphos and Limassol.
The most recent wave of arrivals intensified with the Iranian missile strikes on Tel Aviv and Haifa. With air routes cut and a growing sense of national vulnerability, thousands fled. In the first six months of 2025 around 15,000 Israeli citizens relocated: among them entire families, entrepreneurs and settlers fleeing West Bank outposts because of the regional instability. These do not appear to be temporary moves: according to data from the National Insurance Institute (Bituach Leumi), before 2021 voluntary applications to terminate Israeli residency averaged about 2,500 a year. In 2024 they climbed to 7,756; in 2025 they fell only slightly, to 6,651.
Iranian airstrikes on Israel on October 1, 2024. Picture by Hanay. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0The Expansion of the Movement Tied to Israeli Ultranationalists
Chabad-Lubavitch is a Jewish organisation that relocated to the United States after the Second World War. Today it has more than 4,000 centres in over 100 countries. It declares itself apolitical, but according to the reconstruction by the investigative journalism centre Shomrim, it increasingly openly supports Otzma Yehudit, the ultranationalist party of Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
The politician is under sanctions in 10 countries around the world (including European ones, though not by the European Union). With the 2022 elections, Otzma Yehudit joined the coalition led by Likud. The governing agreement between the two parties contained a clause in favour of Chabad-Lubavitch which, according to Shomrim, is the fruit of the alliance between the movement and Itamar Ben-Gvir’s party.
Having arrived in Cyprus in 2003, Chabad-Lubavitch built on a centuries-old Jewish presence in both Greek and Turkish Cyprus. The organization set up its nerve centre in Larnaca, a city in the European part where the Cyprus Jewish Community Centre is also located.
From there began the expansion that today gives the movement branches across the whole island. The founder of the Cyprus centre, Rabbi Arie Zeev Raskin, backs projects to develop resorts and tourist complexes in the south so that they are kosher, compliant with Jewish law. “Cyprus is an ideal place for Israelis. Just a 40-minute flight away, it is also perfect for anyone who can work from home”, the rabbi said in a 2023 interview with the Israeli site Yedioth-Net. “Many of those arriving are high-tech professionals“, he added, “a sector that is very well rooted on the island”.
He works, almost like a diplomat, in close contact with the Israeli embassy to assist those arriving in Cyprus and to keep Jewish traditions alive, for example through the celebration of Shabbat and the certification of kosher businesses.
According to the Turkish outlet TRT, another rabbi allegedly contributed to property development also in the north of the island.
Rabbi Raskin meets then-President of Cyprus, Dimitris Christofias, 28 August 2008. Picture by Wiki.cjcc. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0The Investor on the Board of Peace
Another much-discussed figure involved in Cypriot real estate is Yakir Gabay, an Israeli-Cypriot billionaire. With an estimated net worth of 4.2 billion dollars, Forbes places him 985th on its list of the world’s richest people. A member of the Board of Peace, the alliance of political leaders launched by Donald Trump in January 2026, he serves as an executive member of the board for Gaza, the instrument meant to make the US American president’s post-conflict plan operational.
Yakir Gabay is the son of Meir Gabay, a former director general of the Israeli Ministry of Justice and Civil Service Commissioner, and of Yemima Gabay, who held senior roles in the State Attorney’s Office and headed the Pardons Department of the Ministry of Justice. According to the Jewish News Syndicate — a US news agency covering the Jewish-Israeli world — as early as November 2023, meaning just one month after the outbreak of the conflict, Yakir Gabay had presented an initial proposal on the future of Gaza. Since 7 October, the billionaire has also stepped up his philanthropic engagement in Israel.
In Cyprus, Gabay owns two companies active in real estate: Avisco Group in Larnaca and Rofeno Properties Limited in Nicosia. The first is a holding company founded in 2008 through which he controls around 15% of Aroundtown SA, a company listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange with a European property portfolio worth about 30 billion euros. The second is a property company that in 2021 bought from the Bank of Cyprus a plot of 949,916 square metres for 28 million euros in the Ayia Phyla area of Limassol. By 2030, the site is expected to host a district with schools, shops and housing, extensive green areas, a research and innovation centre and a European-standard medical rehabilitation facility.
President Donald Trump participates in the Board of Peace Charter Announcement and Signing ceremony during the World Economic Forum, Thursday, January 22, 2026, at the Davos Congress Center in Davos, Switzerland. Picture by Daniel Torok. Public DomainConvicted in Cyprus, Sentence Reduced in Israel
In October 2025 the court of Nicosia, Cyprus’s divided capital, sentenced the businessman Shimon Aykut to five years in prison for developing and marketing luxury apartments built on land belonging to Greek Cypriot families who fled south after the Turkish invasion of 1974.
According to the Republic of Cyprus, that land had been illegally redistributed by the authorities of the island’s northern part. During the trial, Aykut admitted responsibility for 40 charges relating to fraudulent transactions involving that land. Under an agreement with the prosecution, the remaining 202 charges, including money laundering and other related offences, were withdrawn.
Born in Bergama, Turkey, in 1950, Aykut is a civil engineer holding Turkish, Portuguese, Northern Cypriot and Israeli citizenship and the founder of one of the island’s most important property groups, Afik Group. He was arrested while crossing the border between the North and the South of the island in June 2024. In April 2026 he was extradited to serve the rest of his sentence in Israel at his own request, justified on health grounds, an issue also debated during the hearing. “We have an obligation to respect this agreement”, declared Cyprus’s Justice Minister Costas Fitiris, adding that “otherwise we will face consequences”, without specifying which.
According to the minister, because of his age Shimon Aykut will not serve the entire remaining sentence in an Israeli prison. Nevertheless, the minister stressed, Israel has acknowledged in writing that the appropriation of Greek Cypriot land in the occupied territories is a crime. Tel Aviv authorities also issued a travel advisory “recommending that Israelis not buy properties that have been built on Greek Cypriot land”.
The Israelis at the Caesar Project
Afik Group is run by Shimon Aykut’s son Yaakov, born in Tel Aviv, who also holds Northern Cypriot citizenship. A fugitive from Cypriot justice, he is a co-defendant, together with his father and his brother, the latter also part of the family firm’s management, in the land-fraud trial.
In April 2025, in an attempt to secure his father’s release, he wrote to the main US Jewish organisations, rallying “anyone who opposes antisemitism and hatred of Jews” to boycott the meeting with the Cypriot president, who was visiting New York in those days.
The jewel in Afik Group’s crown is the Caesar Project, a resort complex with an estimated value of one billion euros. In total, Afik Group has built 8,600 housing units. In 2023, Aykut stated that at least one hundred of those homes had been bought by Israeli citizens.
Investigations into Trozena
The Cypriot judiciary is also called upon to rule on the compatibility with environmental constraints of another property development promoted by a businessman coming from Israel. The project concerns the redevelopment of Trozena, a village abandoned since 1980 and located in an area that is part of the EU “Natura 2000” network for the protection of flora and fauna. The Hungarian-Israeli businessman Uriel Kertesz intends to turn it into an “ecotourism” facility that includes the renovation of old buildings, a vineyard, a restaurant and wellness areas, and the creation of about sixty homes.
Like the aforementioned Aykut, Kertesz is a civil engineer with dual citizenship who has been managing projects in various countries around the world for more than 40 years. According to opponents of the project, he allegedly restricted access to Trozena’s inhabitants with private guards. The local authorities, in particular Giannis Giannakis, a community leader of Arsos, Trozena and Gerovasa, and the entrepreneur have forcefully rejected the accusations, declaring that the village remains open to the public.
“They are buying a lot of land, apartments and, sometimes, all in a single place on the island: they are trying to create neighbourhoods or entire buildings with Israeli people”, Fidias Panayiotou, MEP for the Cypriot party Direct Democracy, explains. “All of these things are not necessarily bad, but we have to be careful”.
Ruins at Trozena. Picture by Xaris333. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0Very active on social media, Panayiotou has become a spokesman for the Trozena case, drawing accusations of antisemitism from the Israeli ambassador to Cyprus, Oren Anolik. The MEP believes that regulations capable of policing the purchase of large amounts of land do exist, but “the Israelis are trying to get around them in order to acquire more than they are, in principle, allowed to”. Cypriot law, he adds, limits property purchases by non-EU citizens, but has many loopholes in cases where the investor, like Kertesz, holds dual citizenship.
Israel’s Colonialism, Seen from South and North
According to the Cypriot researcher Theodosis Pipis, a doctoral candidate in History at Leiden University, Cyprus is “the scene of an unscrupulous land grab”. As early as 2024, in an analysis piece for the Greek think tank Kedisa, he wrote that the island “could become subject to Israeli economic control, just as in the early stages of settler colonialism in Palestine”.
“Just as Russian and Chinese investments over the last decade brought Cyprus a series of problems with the EU, these investments could generate new ones for the Republic of Cyprus”, he explains, “the Israeli expansion of land ownership, as well as the potential diversion of funds towards the ports, could entail relinquishing Israel partial control of the island, a scenario menacingly similar to the expansion into the Palestinian territories that has taken place over the last century”.
Graffiti in Limassol, Cyprus against Israeli soldiers, photographed in June 2025. Picture by Acediscovery. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0Ceylan Hassan, a Turkish Cypriot researcher raised in London with a doctorate in socio-environmental and epistemic justice from the University of Kent, runs the advocacy project Decolonial Cypriot. “I work on it in my free time, although in some cases the topics overlap with my doctoral research”, she explains.
“The latest thing that confirmed the colonial nature of the situation”, she adds, “were the articles published in Israel Hayom portraying Northern Cyprus as a ‘threat to Israel’s national security’, claiming that Turkey, Hamas and Iran were using it as an unmonitored operations hub, which is completely false. They then wrote that Israel and Greece were coordinating contingency plans to ‘liberate’ the north, which, for Turkish Cypriots, amounts to a death sentence”.