Concerns about how to protect the most vulnerable Ukrainian refugees from human traffickers and other types of sexual abuse in Israel are rising as millions of women and children fled across Ukraine’s borders in face of Russian onslaught.
According to the UN refugee agency, more than 2.5 million people, including more than a million children, have already left war-torn Ukraine, in what has become Europe’s largest humanitarian disaster since World War II.
In Israel citizens and volunteers have been meeting and supporting those whose lives have been devastated by violence.
Support, ranging from free housing to free transportation to professional prospects and other sorts of assistance, is not far away, but neither are the sexual abuses.
Israeli TV 12 reported on a group of Ukrainian refugee women who stated that the Israelis sought to exploit them as sex slaves immediately upon their arrival in the Occupied Territories.
The Ukrainian female refugees say that as soon as they landed at Ben Gurion Airport, Israeli settlers harassed them and encouraged them to offer sexual services.
According to the report, efforts to coerce Ukrainian female asylum seekers into offering sexual services have been reported to the Israeli Ministry of Welfare and the Israeli Ministry of Justice’s Human Trafficking Unit in recent days.
Ukrainian women were deployed to the Panorama Hotel in order to lure them into committing promiscuities.
Over 100 Ukrainian refugees reported a man with a similar description who offered them money to aid them in escaping the war zone in Ukraine, crossing the border, and flying to Israel. When they got in Israel, they claimed that they needed to begin giving sexual services in order to reclaim the money.
Tel Aviv has received more than 6,000 Ukrainian asylum applications, with the number predicted to increase to 15,000 in the following days, according to Zionist authorities.
Israel has shown to be an exceptionally frightening location for the unfortunate Ukrainians. Back in January 2022, the Times of Israel claimed that Israeli Police arrested sex criminal network that transported scores of Ukrainian women to Israel.
Criminal group arranged for women’s travel, living quarters and managed them as sex slaves.
The criminal ring reportedly established contact with the Ukrainian ladies when they were in Ukraine, transported the women to Israel to work as prostitutes, organised their living situation in Israel and carried them from customer to customer.