Israel’s prime minister has suspended a deal made with the UN refugee agency to resettle thousands of African asylum seekers facing prison or deportation, just hours after his office announced an agreement had been reached.

“I’ve decided to suspend implementation of this accord and to rethink the terms of the accord,” Benjamin Netanyahu said in a late-night message on his Facebook page.

His office had earlier announced it had agreed to resettle 16,000 refugees and migrants in western countries including Canada, Italy and Germany.

Netanyahu said he had reached “unprecedented understandings” with the UN. Israel would also regularise the legal status of many of those remaining. But the move immediately angered hardliners who want the Africans to leave and appeared to catch members of his rightwing Likud party and even several cabinet ministers by surprise. The education minister, Naftali Bennett, warned in a tweet that the plan “will turn Israel into a paradise for infiltrators”.

A group of residents of southern Tel Aviv, where many of the migrants have settled, had denounced the plan as “a shame for the state of Israel”. Netanyahu later said he would meet people from that neighbourhood on Tuesday.

Israel has been criticised for a controversial deportation plan under which many asylum seekers would be sent to third countries in Africa in exchange for cash payments. The scheme had run into serious problems including Rwanda and Uganda’s refusal to accept the refugees after they learned that the deportations could happen by force.



The plan was halted temporarily last month by Israel’s supreme court after challenges to its legality following a demonstration by 25,000 people in Tel Aviv.

An estimated 40,000 African migrants and refugees, mainly from Eritrea and Sudan, reside in Israel and they have become the focus of a long-running and often toxic political debate about their future.

Black asylum seekers publicly accusing the country of racism became a public relations liability for Israel and groups of Israeli doctors, academics, poets, Holocaust survivors, rabbis and pilots appealed to halt the plan.

The asylum seekers themselves – including many who claim to be deserters from Eritrean military conscription – have long argued it is unsafe for them return to their countries of origin, while Israel has said it has no responsibility to host them.

Welcoming the earlier decision to shelve the plan, the Movement to Halt the Deportation of Asylum Seekers said: “This agreement would not have happened without dozens of organisations and the contribution of numerous people.

“Israel now has the opportunity to make amends, forge a responsible policy, place the asylum seekers around for absorption – and to treat requests for asylum seriously – and fix up the neighbourhoods of south Tel Aviv where tens of thousands of asylum seekers were sent.”

Adding to the confusion, Germany and Italy said they were unaware of any such resettlement deal.

Many of the migrants and refugees started arriving at Israel’s southern border with Egypt after 2005. Tens of thousands crossed the desert border before Israel completed a barrier in 2012 that stopped the influx.

Speaking at press conference with Netanyahu earlier on Monday, Israel’s interior minister, Arye Dery, said the UN would help to resettle one asylum seeker in a western country for every asylum seeker to whom Israel provided temporary residency status.

Netanyahu said: “I went to the neighbourhoods in south Tel Aviv. I saw the suffering of the Israelis living there and we said that we have to remove the problem. But because the supreme court has banned us from moving them to a country they do not want to go to, we had to find another solution.”