18.08.26, Eden Solomon, Haaretz
after fleeing war, persecution and torture, asylum seekers from Eritrea and Sudan are being contacted by African gangs who have abducted their relatives – and often demand an exorbitant ransom for their release
Two months ago, a phone call abruptly hurled Helen (not her real name) 14 years back in time, to the hell she endured in torture camps in the Sinai Peninsula on her way to Israel. Since eventually making her way here from Eritrea, she has been trying hard to keep her head above water – doing cleaning work, raising three children (one of them a 7-year old autistic daughter) virtually on her own, and grappling with ever-present trauma.
When she was told that her 17-year-old son, who remained in Ethiopia, had recently been abducted, she fell apart. She repeatedly canceled this interview with Haaretz – she simply wasn’t capable of talking. Only after her son eventually made contact, following his release, was she able to summon the strength to speak.
“He disappeared for a week and they called his father demanding that he give them the money or they would kill him,” relates Helen, who is estranged from her husband. The husband, who lives in Ethiopia, didn’t have the money and the abductors then notified Helen that her son was being held in the Libyan desert – and demanded $8,000.
“That was on a Thursday,” she says. “They said: ‘If you don’t bring us the money by Sunday, you can forget about your son.'” Shortly afterward, they sent video clips. In one of them, which was obtained by Haaretz, Helen’s son is seen lying on the ground, his arms and legs bound, bleeding from being whipped unmercifully, his screams bloodcurdling.
The case of Helen and her son is far from unique. Years after fleeing persecution and war in Eritrea and Sudan, dozens of asylum seekersin Israel are having to relive the nightmare. They are told in a phone call that a relative has been abducted in Africa and if they ever want to see them again they must pay a ransom to the tune of as much as $70,000.
Like Helen, many of the recipients of the phone calls have been victims of trafficking themselves and were freed only when a ransom was paid. Typically the families borrow money and raise the funds, while cognizant that this may not ensure that their loved ones will be freed. In some instances the abductees disappear, their fate unknown; others are abducted again after their release.
Relatives who remain in Africa are not the only victims. “Many refugees who were deported from Israel fell into the hands of gangs of smugglers and traffickers, and ended up in Libya,” says Sigal Kook Avivi, a human rights activist who has been assisting asylum seekers in Israel for some 15 years.
To pay the abductors, many victims and their families are compelled to hand over savings they have accumulated over years of working for minimum wage – money that was intended to allow the family to immigrate to a country that would grant them civil status. “People work for years and put aside money,” explains Yehudit Ilani, a social worker in Assaf, a nonprofit that assists refugees and asylum seekers in Israel. “Children who work during vacations also contribute to these savings. Then comes one phone call, and the money that was supposed to go toward an exit ticket for a new life becomes a ransom payment.”
Real-time torture
The abduction of asylum seekers and migrants in Africa is not a new phenomenon. According to a survey published by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, along with the Swiss-based International Organization for Migration and Mixed Migration Center, most of the escape routes from eastern and northeastern Africa lead toward the Mediterranean and are dangerous from start to finish.
The escape route from Eritrea, for example, usually passes through Sudan (in some cases at the convergence of its border with Ethiopia) and the area surrounding the capital, Khartoum, and from there splits. Some refugees, including the Sudanese, travel northward to Egypt; others head west, toward the Libyan border, and cross the Sahara into the northern part of the country and the coast. The dangers in Sudan prompt some to opt for a bypass route to Libya, via Chad.
The abductors found the cellphone Y. had used and called Sigal Kook Avivi, demanding $70,000 for his release. “When I said I had no way to pay such a sum, they tortured him before my eyes until he died,” she relates.
The above-mentioned survey found that each route is rife with risks: violence of every sort, robbery and extortion, sexual assault and rape, and abductions for the purposes of demanding ransom and human trafficking. The assailants are smugglers, crime gangs, armed militias and sometimes also military and government personnel in the countries along the way.
According to data from the Interior Ministry’s Population Authority, at the end of March 2026, there were 17,586 people in Israel who are defined as “infiltrators,” the vast majority of them asylum seekers who arrived from Eritrea (13,460) and Sudan (1,802).
Human rights organizations estimate roughly that 6,000 to 7,000 of those who reached Israel via Sinai before the border fence was erected, in 2012, were abducted and held in torture camps operating in the peninsula. Only about 500 of them were recognized as victims of trafficking by the Justice Ministry. Many testimonies have linked the smuggling and abductions to the Rashaida Bedouin tribe – which is active in the border regions of Eritrea, Sudan, Egypt and Sinai – as well as other, criminal elements.
Since the outbreak of the war in Sudan in 2023, the route of those fleeing from Khartoum to Egypt, which used to take a few days, now takes far longer, and has consequently become more perilous. In recent years, says Monim Haroon, director of Policy Advocacy and Government Relations at the Israeli branch of HIAS, an American-based Jewish aid society that assists asylum seekers and refugees, people are also being abducted in Sudan.
“After the conquest of the city of El Fasher, in the Darfur region, in 2025, thousands of people were taken hostage,” Haroon explains. “The abductors film them, send the video footage to the families and demand a ransom. In the past month alone, 15 to 20 requests have been disseminated among [social media] groups of the Sudanese community here, soliciting funds in order to free abducted family members.”
In a clip shared by Haroon, a man named Mujib a-Rahman, from the city of Kabkabiya, in Sudan, relates that he has been abducted and pleads for help.
“Fifteen days ago we were abducted by the Rapid Support Forces [Sudanese paramilitary troops],” a-Rahman says. “Seven of us were abducted. Four died and two were freed after their families paid for them. I am still being held. For 15 days my family hasn’t heard a thing about me – they don’t know where I am and haven’t received information about my situation. I’m asking anyone who gets this message, even if they don’t know me, to circulate the video so that it will reach my family or anyone who can help, in the hope that I will somehow manage to get out of the place where I am now.”
A video of a man kidnapped in Sudan asking for help updating his family on what happened to him.
Another route, no less dangerous, passes through Libya – a major channel of transit for migrants and asylum seekers from Africa to the Mediterranean region and Europe. Indeed, since the fall of the regime of Muammar Gadhafi, in 2011, Libya has become one of the central hubs of abductions and human trafficking on the continent, after the collapse of the state’s institutions and the struggle between government bodies and the militias created a vacuum that was filled by smuggling and trafficking networks.
According to a joint report of the UN’s refugee agency and the UN delegation to Libya published this year, African migrants and refugees are taken into custody and abducted by trafficking networks, many of which have ties with local authorities and also with crime networks abroad. Many of the abductees are held in detention facilities and unofficial camps, where they undergo torture and sexual violence, and are mobilized for forced labor. The captors demand a ransom from their families in order to secure their release.
“It was like a wedding: People came in, put an envelope in a box and left,” relates Omar, 38, who fled Darfur and arrived in Israel in 2007. “No one asked me when I would pay it back. They knew that if I didn’t pay, my family would die.”
In the past, the abductors pressured the families via phone calls in which the victims’ screams were audible in the background. In recent years, however, the cruelty has apparently intensified and the abuse is documented in clips that are sometimes sent in real time.
A video call from May 2019 haunts Israeli activist Kook Avivi to this day. She remembers the date well, because shortly after the call she suffered a cardiological emergency that required surgery. Some time before that, Y., a Sudanese refugee whom she had met five years earlier, during the demonstrations at Nitzana, when Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers who were incarcerated in the nearby Holot detention facility staged a “freedom march” at that border crossing, near Egypt.
was subsequently deported by Israel to Uganda. There, she says, he was apparently abducted and trafficked via South Sudan and the Sahara, ending up in Libya. Incarcerated in the torture facilities in Tripoli, he somehow got hold of a phone and contacted her. “He wrote: ‘Get me out of here, I don’t know what to do,'” she says. “He said he was being raped because he wasn’t capable of working.”
A few days later, the abductors found the cellphone Y. had used and called Avivi, demanding $70,000 for his release. “When I said I had no way to pay such a sum, they tortured him before my eyes until he died,” she relates. “I was in a state of shock, I felt horribly guilty for not being able to help. I have hardly ever talked about it until now. Libya was hell. People simply don’t understand just how awful the horrors there are.”
Many activists who work with asylum seekers are pointing fingers at the European Union, which since 2015 has been cooperating with the Libyan authorities, including the Coast Guard, to block migration northward, via the Mediterranean. International rights organizations, such as Amnesty International, fault the EU for persisting in this policy, despite knowing what is going on in Libya.
‘Like slavery’
Yunus (not his real name), an Eritrean who lives in Be’er Sheva and works as a Tigrinya translator at the psychiatric clinic for asylum seekers at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, paid tens of thousands of shekels in recent years to secure the release of four members of his family who were abducted. He also knows the terror of abduction firsthand: He reached Israel alone, via Sudan and Sinai, in 2012, when he was 16. Before that, he had been taken captive in Sudan and was released only after his brother, already living in Israel, paid a ransom.
“My first years in this country were like slavery – I worked only to pay back the money,” he says, adding that as a teenager at a boarding school, he spent his summers working in hothouses, kiosks and wherever he could earn a few shekels. But he insists that he was one of the lucky ones, because unlike others he did not undergo torture in the camps.
Most of his family eventually found asylum in Europe. Does he not feel a sense of relief? “No,” Yunus replies. “Now it’s harder for me. Back then I was totally preoccupied with them. Now there’s nothing except dealing with myself. I don’t even know how to begin to think about that.”
A few years later, three of his siblings escaped to a refugee camp in Sudan. Between 2022 and 2023 another brother was abducted in Libya while trying to reach Europe; then their nephew was also captured. One of Yunus’ sisters was captured in Khartoum while shopping in a local market. On each occasion the demand arrived by phone: pay, or they will be tortured and die. Yunus obeyed.
Within two years he paid more than $15,000, at times working 16 or 17 hours a day in order to make money. Recently he also contributed to a fund for the release of a cousin who had been abducted in Libya on the way to a third country and held for about a year in a torture camp.
“He looked like a skeleton when he came out,” Yunus says.
Most of his family eventually found asylum in Europe, and only his parents remain in Eritrea. Does he not feel a sense of relief? “No,” Yunus replies without hesitation. “Now it’s harder for me. Back then I was totally preoccupied with them [his relatives] – where they were, how they were doing, how I could get more money. Now there’s nothing except dealing with myself. It’s hard for me. I want to start studying, to do something with myself, but I don’t even know how to begin to think about that.”
The solution to the problem, says Mulugeta Sultan, who is active in the Eritrean community in Israel and opposes the regime in Eritrea, does not lie in waging a battle against the abduction networks, but rather in dealing with the reasons why people flee. “As long as the dictatorship lasts, people will keep on escaping and the abductions will continue,” he asserts. “The only solution is to topple the regime.”
Relatives of abductees are not the only ones who step in to raise funds. The whole asylum-seeking community is involved. “It’s amazing every time anew to see this solidarity,” according to activist Yehudit Ilani, from the Assaf NGO. “People give up their dream so that someone else will have a chance to live.”
An example of this solidarity was evident three years ago, when a Sudanese restaurant in south Tel Aviv became a war room for rescuing people: Within two days, tens of thousands of dollars were collected there to free relatives of Omar (not his real name) who were abducted on the Sudan-Egypt border.
“It was like a wedding: People came in, put an envelope in a box and left,” relates Omar, 38, who fled Darfur and arrived in Israel in 2007. “No one asked me when I would pay it back, and no one asked for a shekel back. They knew that if I didn’t pay, my family would die.”
When the civil war broke out in Sudan three years ago, Omar paid smugglers to help his mother, three sisters and their children get to Egypt. “I knew there was a good chance they would be captured along the way and that more money would be demanded – people who escape from a war are easy prey,” he notes.
Indeed, Omar lost touch with his family and a few days later was contacted by people demanding $30,000 for their release. “What did I feel? Relief,” he admits. “Until that call I was sure they had been killed. Those were the hardest days of my life. I didn’t function, all I did was cry.”
When the money was raised, Omar was told to go to the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv. A car pulled up next to him. “The driver called out my name like we were friends, I gave him the envelope and the car disappeared,” he recalls. Two days later, another phone call informed him that his family had been released and were in Egypt.
‘My heart stopped’
Haaretz has learned about another case during the past two years, in which an asylum seeker was told to transfer funds via a local mediator as ransom for a family abducted in Egypt. As early as 2010, the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants warned that abduction networks were being assisted by middlemen in Israel to collect money. Two years later, an indictment was filed against a resident of the Bedouin city of Rahat, in the Negev, on suspicion of transferring such funds to a squad of abductors.
As early as 2010, the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants warned that abduction networks were being assisted by middlemen in Israel to collect money.
Helen, for one, didn’t have money to pay the abductors for her son’s release. At the time, she also wasn’t able to work because of difficulties in renewing her own visa, but she knew she must not talk about that. “It would only make things worse,” she explains. On the day after the conversation she had with the captors, she was rushed to the hospital. “I felt like I wasn’t able to breathe, that my heart had stopped,” she says. “I woke up in the hospital and didn’t understand what I was doing there – and had only one day to get the money.”
It wasn’t only a mother’s anxiety for her son that Helen was experiencing, but also memories of being abducted herself: She arrived in Israel in 2012 after seven months in a Sinai torture camp, where she was raped and became pregnant. Her brother, who lives in the United States, paid her ransom, but she was held in captivity for many more months thereafter. “So I rushed to pay [my son’s] abductors, because I knew what he was going through. I felt it on my own flesh,” she says now.
According to Lilach Ofer, a social worker who directs two clinics at Ichilov Hospital, Yahad and Derech, which provide psychiatric treatment to survivors of torture camps, victims of trafficking and asylum seekers – some of her patients live in constant fear of the next phone call.
“The greatest terror of parents who have children remaining in Eritrea is to hear that things are not good for them there and they want out. Because if the children leave, they will be abducted – there’s no question about that, from their [the parents’] point of view,” she says. “Sometimes they explain to the children that there won’t be enough money to rescue them.”
Adds Ofer: “Think of the posttraumatic parents who don’t succeed in holding down a job. How will they get $50,000 to free their son? Many were trafficking victims themselves. One of the hardest things in recovery is knowing that someone you love is now undergoing the trauma that you survived.”
One of the first calls Helen made was to Michal Zimri, a social worker who directs a community center for asylum seekers in Petah Tikva. Zimri had assisted Helen when she arrived in Israel and helped her get through an abortion. Zimri disseminated a fundraising request via social media, and in short order 8,000 shekels (about $2,700) were raised. Helen borrowed the rest of the $8,000 from acquaintances and sent the money to the abductors. They replied that they would release her son within two days.
The first conversation with him was brief. “He said he was in Libya, hungry and exhausted, and asked me to send money for clothes and a phone, but I didn’t have it,” she relates, adding that she later learned from him that initially, his abductors had invited him to have a drink with them – “and then they put him in a car and took him to Gondar [in Ethiopia], and from there to Sudan and via the Sahara to Libya.”
Her son is still in Libya, Helen says, and he hopes either to get to Europe or return home to Ethiopia. However, either of those possibilities would entail huge sums of money he doesn’t have. His mother knows that as long as he’s still in Libya, a constant threat looms of his being abducted again.
“I’m totally exhausted,” she says, almost in a whisper. “I have nothing to hold onto. It’s like there’s no hope.”
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