JERUSALEM (The Thursday Times) — Israel has widened its offer of $3,500 and a free flight to migrants who agree to leave, opening the scheme to nationals of every African country until the end of the year as the number of people departing with state help falls.
The change took effect on Monday and will run until December 31, Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority said. Applications must be submitted by that date.
The grant now covers African nationals who have stayed in Israel for more than two years without a valid visa, as well as those holding temporary residence permits. For the first time, it also includes people who entered the country legally but overstayed their visas. The authority expects several thousand more people to qualify, including citizens of Nigeria, South Africa, and Togo.
Until now, the payment was mostly open to people who crossed into Israel outside official border points. That group is largely made up of nationals of Eritrea, Sudan, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, and Guinea, along with citizens of countries that have no diplomatic relations with Israel.
How the scheme works
Applicants can register online or in person, attend an interview, and obtain travel documents. They then receive a free flight and are paid the $3,500 at the airport. Those who are approved can be protected from immigration detention for up to two weeks before they leave, under a programme the authority says allows foreign nationals to depart in a “respectful and decent manner”.
No similar expansion has been announced for nationals of European, Asian, or American countries.
Departures falling
The authority’s figures show that 3,511 African nationals left with help from its voluntary departure unit in 2024. That fell to 2,815 in 2025, a drop of about 20 per cent.
In its 2025 annual report, the authority blamed smaller asylum quotas in Canada, the closure of US borders to asylum seekers, and airspace closures caused by war in the region, which disrupted flights.
Eritreans made up 89 per cent of the African nationals who left through the scheme last year. About 90 per cent of the Eritreans and Sudanese who left went to countries outside Africa, the authority’s data show, and around 2 per cent returned to their home countries.
A long-running dispute
The offer echoes a 2018 plan under which Benjamin Netanyahu’s government gave about 38,000 mostly Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers a choice between leaving for an unnamed third country with $3,500 and a plane ticket, or going to prison. The plan was dropped in April that year after Netanyahu scrapped a resettlement deal with the United Nations.
Israel recognises fewer than 0.1 per cent of asylum claims, according to a December 2025 report by the Forum of Refugee and Asylum Seeker Organizations in Israel. The forum estimates that about 13,000 Eritreans and 6,700 Sudanese remain in the country under group protection from deportation.
In August, the interior ministry said it would grant temporary residence to Sudanese asylum seekers who had applied by June 2025.
Ethiopians have lost that protection altogether. After Israel’s High Court upheld the government’s withdrawal of their group protection in December 2025, authorities began arresting Ethiopian asylum seekers in March. The aid group Assaf has estimated that about 8,000 Ethiopians face deportation, around 1,000 of them from the Tigray region.
