Israel still a hotbed of human trafficking
By Raffi Berg
Marina rarely leaves her two-room home in northern Israel these days.
She is in hiding – wanted by the Israeli authorities for being an illegal immigrant, and by the criminal gangs who brought her here to sell her into prostitution.
Marina – not her real name – was lured to Israel by human traffickers.
During the height of the phenomenon, from the beginning of the 1990s to the early years of 2000, an estimated 3,000 women a year were brought to Israel on the false promise of jobs and a better way of life.
“When I was in the Ukraine, I had a difficult life,” said Marina, who came to Israel in 1999 at the age of 33 after answering a newspaper advertisement offering the opportunity to study abroad.
“I was taken to an apartment in Ashkelon, and other women there told me I was now in prostitution. I became hysterical, but a guy starting hitting me and then others there raped me.
“I was then taken to a place where they sold me – just sold me!” she said, recalling how she was locked in a windowless basement for a month, drank water from a toilet and was deprived of food.
That part of her ordeal only ended when she managed to escape, but the physical and mental scars remain.
Last year, the United Nations named Israel as one of the main destinations in the world for trafficked women; it has also consistently appeared as an offender in the annual US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons (Tip) report.
While this year’s report said Israel was making “significant efforts” to eliminate trafficking, it said it still does not “fully comply with the minimum standards” to do so.
Like Marina, some trafficked women are brought into the country legally, while others are smuggled by Bedouins across the border from Egypt.
In all cases, the traffickers – as many as 20 in the chain from recruitment to sale – take away the women’s passports before selling them on to pimps.
Sometimes the women are subjected to degrading human auctions, where they are stripped, examined and sold for $8,000-$10,000. (…Full Article)
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