Israel to deport thousands of Ethiopian asylum seekers

[Deeq A.]

Tel Aviv, Israel – Israel is preparing to deport Ethiopian asylum seekers as early as next month after its High Court upheld a controversial government decision to strip them of temporary group protection.

The planned deportations have drawn outrage from rights groups, who warn that the move will force vulnerable people back to a country edging towards a renewed and devastating civil war.

The crackdown follows a January 2024 directive by then interior minister Moshe Arbel, who said there was no longer any security obstacle to returning Ethiopian citizens, including those from the war-ravaged Tigray region.

In December, Israel’s High Court backed the government’s position and rejected a legal challenge brought by a coalition of refugee organisations. The ruling gave the affected Ethiopians four months to prepare for their departure.

Rights advocates and Israeli authorities say immigration enforcement and deportations are expected to begin in mid-April.

Disputed numbers

The exact size of the population at risk remains heavily disputed, reflecting a system in which many undocumented Africans live entirely off the radar.

ASSAF, an Israeli aid organisation, estimates that around 8,000 Ethiopians now live in Israel under varying and precarious legal categories.

The Hotline for Refugees and Migrants (HRM), however, says the withdrawal of group protection directly endangers just under 1,400 people.

The Israeli Interior Ministry has cited an even lower figure, saying only about 700 individuals whose asylum claims were previously rejected face imminent removal.

Whatever the final figure, fear across the community is palpable.

Israel first granted blanket group protection to Ethiopian nationals in November 2021 at the height of the Tigray war.

The brutal conflict, which pitted Ethiopian federal forces against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), killed hundreds of thousands through direct combat, state-driven famine and the collapse of regional healthcare.

Although an African Union-brokered peace deal formally paused the bloodshed in November 2022, that fragile truce now appears to be unravelling.

In late January 2026, fierce clashes broke out again in western Tigray. Witnesses reported military drones hovering over the region and carrying out strikes.

The worsening security situation forced Ethiopian Airlines to cancel all commercial flights to Tigray’s airports, including the regional capital Mekele, cutting off a vital lifeline.

Panicked residents have reportedly started fleeing the region by car and withdrawing cash from ATMs as they prepare for the possible return of full-scale war.

Fear of new war 

Regional tensions are also rising. Ethiopia and neighbouring Eritrea have recently traded accusations over military aggression and border mobilisation, fuelling international fears that instability in the north could widen into a cross-border conflict.

Human Rights Watch says Ethiopia still has roughly 3.3 million internally displaced people, with hundreds of thousands in Tigray and neighbouring Amhara living in precarious conditions and with severely limited access to food and aid.

For Israeli campaigners, those facts make the deportation drive legally and morally indefensible.

They have also pointed to what they describe as a glaring contradiction: Israel’s own Foreign Ministry recently issued a strict travel warning advising Israeli citizens against all non-essential travel to Tigray because of the renewed fighting.

The deportation drive against Ethiopians is not an isolated case. It forms part of a decades-long Israeli effort to deter and expel African asylum seekers.

Between 2006 and 2013, tens of thousands of Africans, mainly from Eritrea and Sudan, arrived in Israel after making a perilous journey on foot across Egypt’s Sinai desert, before Israel built a massive border wall to seal the route.

Israel considers the vast majority of those arrivals to be illegal ‘work infiltrators’ rather than genuine refugees.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), about 80,000 people have sought asylum in Israel over the past 20 years. Fewer than one percent have ever won official refugee status.

Deterrence system

Although Israel is a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, it has never passed domestic refugee legislation.

Instead, successive Israeli governments have tried to make life unbearable for asylum seekers in order to encourage their ‘voluntary’ departure.

Those measures have included indefinite detention in the remote Holot desert facility, the confiscation of part of their wages and the denial of access to the formal labour market.

In 2018, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government notoriously tried to strike secret deals to deport African migrants to Rwanda and Uganda.

When both African states publicly denied those arrangements amid a global backlash, Netanyahu then signed, and within hours scrapped, a landmark pact with the UNHCR that would have resettled thousands of migrants in Western countries while regularising the status of others in Israel.

Today, most long-term African asylum seekers remain trapped in legal limbo. Temporary visas protect them from immediate deportation, but they must renew them frequently and they remain shut out of basic social, economic and healthcare rights.

An ASSAF-backed study published in 2025 found that the human cost of the policy was severe: around 57 percent of surveyed refugees and asylum seekers in Israel were living in severe poverty, while 85 percent were facing some form of food insecurity.

For the Ethiopians now facing the April deportation deadline, the threat is no longer an abstract policy debate. The legal countdown has begun, pushing hundreds of people closer to the exit even as the country they once fled slides back towards the abyss of war.

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