They Fled Ethiopia’s War. Now, Israel May Send Them Back.

JERUSALEM—For 75 days starting in 2020, Luwam Habteab slept on the floor of a prison cell, given little food and no medical care. She was detained that November by Ethiopian security forces for her reporting on the Axum massacre, in which Eritrean forces killed hundreds of civilians over a weekend—one of the deadliest episodes of the 2020-22 Tigray war.

Upon her release, Habteab found that her apartment had been sealed by federal police. Her family had warned her not to return there, telling her that security forces were waiting. A local archbishop with a connection at the Israeli Embassy interceded, after which Habteab was ushered out of the country. She landed in Tel Aviv in August 2023 and applied for asylum. (Habteab is identified by a pseudonym out of fear of reprisal.)

Habteab now lives in Jerusalem’s Old City, where she spends most of her days praying. As of August, she was one of 1,334 Ethiopians with open asylum claims before Israel’s Interior Ministry, according to figures that the ministry confirmed to Foreign Policy.

Months after Habteab arrived, in January 2024, the Israeli Interior Ministry determined that the situation in Ethiopia was stable enough to send its nationals home, revoking the group protection that had shielded asylum-seekers from deportation. That stability did not last: This July, Tigray’s regional authorities declared that the 2022 peace agreement with the federal government had collapsed, accusing Addis Ababa of preparing for war.

Last month, an alliance of rebel groups launched a full-scale offensive against federal forces, seizing airports across Tigray and pushing into neighboring Afar and Amhara states. Federal forces have since retaken Tigray’s capital, though the rebels have vowed to keep fighting; Eritrea and Ethiopia have cut diplomatic ties. Explosions have been reported in Addis Ababa, which Israeli authorities say is safe for returnees.

Habteab has watched with dread as the fighting returned to her home province. Much of Tigray is under a communications blackout, reviving fears of the total siege during the 2020-22 war that starved the region and killed as many as 600,000 people. Habteab’s family in Tigray is almost impossible to reach, she said.

With Israel’s national elections set for Oct. 27, civil society advocates warn that right-wing politicians are once again casting asylum-seekers as a threat to gain a leg up. 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.

Habteab and other asylum-seekers in Israel have few places left to go as domestic politics turn against them and Western governments dismantle the asylum system that was supposed to protect them.

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Israel has a long history with the notion of asylum. Founded by refugees in the wake of the Holocaust as a safe haven for the Jewish diaspora, the country was among the first signatories of the 1951 Refugee Convention. Jewish jurists were instrumental in shaping the convention’s core nonrefoulement principle, the rule that no one may be returned to a country where their life is at risk.

Yet, since the Israeli government took over processing asylum claims from the United Nations in 2009, it has granted asylum status to less than 1 percent of those seeking it, according to HIAS Israel, a Jewish humanitarian nonprofit.

Israel has also long held a place in the imagination of Ethiopian asylum-seekers as the land of the ancient Israelites, in whose story of exile and return they saw themselves. In practical terms, the country was also the closest state offering asylum that they could reach without undertaking the perilous Mediterranean crossing.

Of the Ethiopians in Israel who are not Jewish, some—such as Habteab—fled during the Tigray war and its aftermath. But most have been in Israel for a decade or more, arriving on pilgrimage visas or by crossing the Egyptian border before Israel completed its fence there in 2013. They, too, are asylum-seekers: Almost all applied for protection after arriving, having fled earlier rounds of interethnic violence and state persecution, according to the Jerusalem African Community Center (JACC), a support and advocacy organization for the city’s African asylum-seekers.

On arrival, they opened asylum claims with the Interior Ministry and were interviewed about why they had come to Israel. Under Israeli law, the ministry was meant to review each claim and decide whether to grant refugee status—a process that, for most of these asylum-seekers, didn’t happen. Now, according to advocates, many Ethiopian applicants are being summoned back after more than a decade for a second interview to determine whether they can stay in Israel.

Asked for comment, Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority said, “there is no policy of deportation regarding this group” and that cases are examined individually. The authority added that it does not determine whether a country is safe for returnees, referring questions to the Israeli Foreign Ministry. (The Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.)

Anat Ben-Dor, who runs the Refugee Rights Clinic at Tel Aviv University, said the burden of proof placed on applicants for asylum to establish a credible fear of persecution is set very high and that interviewers look for inconsistencies between what an applicant says 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,” Ben-Dor 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, another 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 that they could recover only by leaving the country.

After the follow-up interview, the Interior Ministry decides whether an asylum-seeker may stay in Israel or must leave—but the outcome is almost always the same, according to Yael Paul Strauss, who runs the psychosocial department at JACC.

By her account, 90 percent to 95 percent of those summoned are rejected and given three to four months to leave the country. “It’s presented as giving them another chance, but in reality, they’re just being called in to be told they have to leave,” Paul Strauss said.

The cost of contesting a rejection is steep, running at around $4,000 to petition a denied application and another $4,000 for an appeal, according to Paul Strauss. Few employers will hire someone with a temporary permit, regardless of their profession or level of education in Ethiopia, leaving most asylum-seekers with few ways to raise that kind of money.

Paul Strauss described a message that she had recently received from a mother of three small children who had paid to appeal her asylum rejection, lost, and had no idea where she would find the money to try again. “She turns to me, ‘Please help me, save my life,’ and I have nothing to give her,” Paul Strauss said.

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For many Ethiopian asylum-seekers, the answer to Israel’s stonewalling was to seek resettlement in a third country, another cornerstone of asylum law. For years, the main destination was the United States, which accepted a small number of the most vulnerable cases referred by the U.N. However, that route is now all but closed.

When he returned to office in 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump effectively dismantled the U.S. refugee admissions program and suspended the entry of all refugees into the country, including those who had already been screened. Following legal challenges, the Trump administration resumed limited admissions under a historically low cap of 7,500 refugees for fiscal year 2026—admissions that have been allocated almost entirely to white South African Afrikaners.

In December 2025, the Trump administration also terminated the temporary protected status that Ethiopians were granted during the Tigray war. Around 900 asylum-seekers in Israel—mainly Sudanese and Eritrean, along with some Ethiopians—were in the pipeline to be resettled to the United States as of early 2025, according to Sivan Carmel, the country director of HIAS Israel, which processed the cases.

Some had already cleared their medical and security checks, had departure dates, and needed only plane tickets. “They’d left their jobs; they’d already told their landlords they’d be leaving” before their entry to the United States was denied, Carmel said.

The office of the U.N. refugee agency in Israel, which referred those cases and managed resettlement out of the country, has been hollowed out as part of the same pattern of global retrenchment against asylum—its staff reduced to three and its Tel Aviv office cut. Agency staff struggle to keep up with the thousands of open asylum claims.

This has left the work to fall to groups such as JACC, which operates on a shoestring budget. Paul Strauss spends hours filling in resettlement forms with families who cannot afford a lawyer. Each time Paul Strauss submits a file, she said, the U.N. representative reminds her that completing it does not guarantee placement elsewhere.

For those who cannot leave for another country and cannot stay in Israel, the return of war to Ethiopia has taken away their last consolation: the hope that the danger that they fled might be in the past. As armed forces push toward Ethiopia’s capital and much of Tigray remains in the dark, many of the families that Israel intends to send back can’t even get in touch with their relatives.

For those working on behalf of the asylum-seekers, the bigger picture is not lost. “I want to live in a state that I’m not embarrassed by,” Pomeranz said. “I kept thinking things couldn’t get worse. They keep getting worse.”