The United Nations on Tuesday urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “reconsider” his decision to scrap an agreement on resettling thousands of African migrants following tough domestic criticism, The Times of Israel reports.
“UNHCR notes the announcement of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu that he has cancelled the Israel-UNHCR agreement of April 2nd on solutions for Eritreans and Sudanese living in Israel,” a spokesman for the UN agency, William Spindler, told AFP in an email.
“We continue to believe in the need for a win-win agreement that can benefit Israel, the international community and people needing asylum and we hope that Israel will reconsider its decision soon,” he said.
Hours after announcing the agreement himself in a televised address on Monday afternoon, Netanyahu changed course, suspending it, and on Tuesday he canceled it after facing pressure from his right-wing base.
“Every year I make thousands of decisions benefiting the State of Israel and Israeli citizens. Occasionally a decision is reached that has to be reconsidered,” he said Tuesday at a meeting with anti-migrant activists from south Tel Aviv, where many of the migrants reside.
As the meeting began, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, who leads the right-wing Jewish Home party, tweeted that the temporary halt was not enough.
“The agreement with the United Nations to absorb the infiltrators is bad for Israel,” he said. “It is not enough to freeze it. I call on the prime minister to cancel it entirely.”
The agreement was designed to end the possibility of forced deportations of thousands of migrants from Israel to Rwanda. Under the agreement, a minimum of 16,250 migrants would have instead been resettled in Western nations.
In return, Israel would grant temporary residency to an equal number of migrants.
The presence of the primarily Sudanese and Eritrean migrants in Israel has become a key political issue.
Israel’s earlier deportation policy, which offered each migrant $3,500 and a plane ticket, had been condemned by Israeli activists and the United Nations as chaotic, poorly executed, and unsafe. Asylum seekers previously deported to Uganda and Rwanda have told The Times of Israel they faced serious danger and even imprisonment after arriving in Africa without proper documents.
The Supreme Court froze the deportations in mid-March in response to a petition.