Luwam Habteab, a pseudonym used out of fear of reprisal, is one of the Ethiopians waiting for a decision. A journalist, she spent 75 days in a prison cell in 2020 after Ethiopian security forces detained her for reporting on the Axum massacre, in which Eritrean forces killed hundreds of civilians, one of the deadliest episodes of the 2020-22 Tigray war. On release, she found her apartment sealed by federal police. With the help of an archbishop who had a connection at the Israeli Embassy, she left Ethiopia and landed in Tel Aviv in August 2023, applying for asylum. She is one of the 1,334 Ethiopians with open asylum claims before the Interior Ministry, according to figures the ministry confirmed. She now spends most of her days praying in Jerusalem's Old City.
In January 2024, the Interior Ministry revoked the group protection that had shielded Ethiopian asylum seekers from deportation, judging Ethiopia stable enough for returns. That assessment has been overtaken. In July, Tigray's regional authorities declared the 2022 peace agreement with the federal government collapsed, accusing Addis Ababa of preparing for war. Last month, an alliance of rebel groups launched a full-scale offensive, seizing airports across Tigray and pushing into the neighbouring Afar and Amhara states. Federal forces have retaken Tigray's capital, but the rebels have vowed to keep fighting, and Eritrea and Ethiopia have cut diplomatic ties. Explosions have been reported in Addis Ababa, which Israeli authorities say is safe for returnees. Much of Tigray is under a communications blackout, reviving fears of the siege that starved the region during the 2020-22 war, which killed as many as 600,000 people.
Habteab's family in Tigray is almost impossible to reach, she said, and she watches with dread as fighting returns to her home province.
Israel has a long history with the notion of asylum. Founded by refugees in the wake of the Holocaust, it was among the first signatories of the 1951 Refugee Convention, and Jewish jurists were instrumental in shaping the convention's nonrefoulement principle, the rule that no one may be returned to a country where their life is at risk. Yet since Israel took over asylum processing from the United Nations in 2009, it has granted refugee status to less than 1 percent of applicants, according to HIAS Israel, a Jewish humanitarian nonprofit. Most non-Jewish Ethiopians in Israel arrived a decade or more ago, many on pilgrimage visas or by crossing the Egyptian border before Israel completed its fence there in 2013. Advocates say many are now being summoned back for a second interview to determine whether they can stay.
Anat Ben-Dor, who runs the Refugee Rights Clinic at Tel Aviv University, said the burden of proof placed on applicants is set very high and interviewers look for inconsistencies between what applicants say now and what they said on arrival. "The whole interview is actually an effort not to find the truth, but to find flaws and problems in the testimony," she said. "Very few people can successfully pass such an interview, particularly when the system is so slow that people are being interviewed about events that sometimes occurred 10 years earlier."
Asked whether the system was dysfunctional or intentionally obstructive, Michal Pomeranz, a lawyer who represents asylum seekers, said it was both. "They clearly want to make people's lives here miserable, and that's something even the Supreme Court has said," she said, referring to a 2020 ruling that struck down a law requiring asylum seekers to deposit 20 percent of their wages into a fund they could recover only by leaving the country. According to Yael Paul Strauss, who runs the psychosocial department at the Jerusalem African Community Center, 90 to 95 percent of those summoned are rejected.
Israel's Population and Immigration Authority said "there is no policy of deportation regarding this group" and that cases are examined individually. It said it does not determine whether a country is safe for returnees, referring questions to the Foreign Ministry, which did not respond to a request for comment.
The issue has become political. Israel's national elections are set for Oct. 27, and civil society advocates warn that right-wing politicians are once again casting asylum seekers as a threat. Israeli officials refer to some migrants and refugees as "infiltrators," a term embedded in the country's own laws, and successive governments have described their presence as a danger to Israel's Jewish character.