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Israel deputy Mayor investigated for trafficking Ukrainian woman for prostitution

October 21, 2022 at 6:54 pm

A woman, fleeing from Ukraine, on March 21, 2022 [Stringer/Anadolu Agency]

A deputy Mayor of a central Israeli city was interrogated by police for allegedly trafficking a Ukrainian woman into the country for prostitution, amid a growing network of trafficked and smuggled Ukrainian and Russian women throughout the Middle East.

According to Israeli media reports, the deputy Mayor of an unspecified city in central Israel was taken in and interrogated today by the police force’s Lahav 433 major crimes division for his role in trafficking the Ukrainian woman, who arrived in the country on a flight yesterday evening.

The woman, who is reportedly in her 30s, arrived from Thailand and initially told the Interior Ministry’s Population and Immigration Authority that she came to Israel to participate in a conference connected to the deputy Mayor.

Despite showing authorities a signed invitation letter that she received from the official, it was reportedly discovered that the conference did not exist. Furthermore, authorities found indications on her phone that she intended to enter Israel for prostitution purposes, according to the newspaper, Haaretz.

Reports also cited a reporter of the Globes financial newspaper as revealing that the woman told Israeli authorities that the official “told me to just say all the time that I was coming to an educational conference related to security systems, and emphasised that I should say that I’m not really supposed to know what will be at the conference.”

READ: Israel is not making enough effort against human trafficking, says US

The deputy Mayor, who was also questioned over allegations of receiving unspecified items fraudulently, has been released under restrictive conditions. For the meanwhile, police are reportedly investigating whether he has also provided forged documents to other Ukrainian women in order to smuggle them into the country, too.

Israel has long been affiliated with global human trafficking, especially in children and prostitution. Last year, the US criticised its ally for not doing enough to combat human trafficking, and the Israeli Hotline for Refugees and Migrants released a report stating that the Israeli government is encouraging the practice by neglecting to tackle it, and instead leaving it to humanitarian organisations and NGOs to solve.

Human trafficking into Israel is suspected to have only increased with the Russian invasion of Ukraine this year, which caused an influx of tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees into the country.

If a human trafficking network dealing in Ukrainian women is operational, it would not be the first time such a phenomenon took place. In 2015, Israeli police foiled a trafficking and prostitution network in central Israel, in which young Russian and Ukrainian women were convinced to come to the country on tourist visas and guaranteed they would find work.

The potential exploitation of Ukrainian women and refugees is not limited only to Israel, but is also prominent in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where Ukrainian women and children have reportedly been brought for the purposes of sex work.

READ: Israeli ‘sex tourism’ is the fruit of normalisation with the UAE