By: Mike Wagenheim/The Media Line - August 24, 2021

Out of her home in the coastal Israeli town of Zichron Yaakov, Charmaine Hedding is working feverishly to help extract thousands of people desperate to leave Afghanistan.

Hedding is an emergency response specialist and president of the Shai Fund, a humanitarian organization based in Israel and registered in the US. She says her organization is heading up logistics, in coordination with the US military, on a pending series of private flights that are set to swoop in and out of Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, in order to evacuate high-risk human rights defenders and other activists, including some high-profile personnel, who are direct targets of the Taliban, the Islamist group that has rapidly retaken control of the country upon the withdrawal of US and international forces, two decades after being overthrown.

“We formed a coalition because, of course, this is a huge operation. We have private charter flights. So, this is a civil society, grassroots initiative, run by NGOs (non-government organizations) like mine. We have raised the funds to get the flights in. So we have our first flight arriving. And these flights can take up to 300 people,” Hedding told The Media Line.

Israel-based org to send private flights to evacuate activists from Kabul