Israel improves rank in 2026 US trafficking report, meeting minimum requirements; anti labor trafficking measures still lacking

The US government’s 2026 Trafficking in Persons Report finds that Israel fully meets the minimum standards for the elimination of human trafficking, as set out in the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA), in an improvement from the previous year’s report.

The report, released yesterday, places Israel in Tier 1, along with 32 other countries, including the US, UK, Argentina, Canada, and France.

The minimum standards for combating trafficking, as laid out in the TVPA, are:

1. The government of the country should prohibit severe forms of trafficking in persons and punish acts of such trafficking.
2.  For the knowing commission of any act of sex trafficking involving force, fraud, coercion, or in which the victim of sex trafficking is a child incapable of giving meaningful consent, or of trafficking which includes rape or kidnapping or which causes a death, the government of the country should prescribe punishment commensurate with that for grave crimes, such as forcible sexual assault.
3.  For the knowing commission of any act of a severe form of trafficking in persons, the government of the country should prescribe punishment that is sufficiently stringent to deter and that adequately reflects the heinous nature of the offense.
4.  The government of the country should make serious and sustained efforts to eliminate severe forms of trafficking in persons.

The results are an improvement from the 2025 report, which placed Israel in Tier 2, reserved for countries that “do not fully meet the TVPA’s minimum standards but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards.”

The report states that Israel’s upgrade is due to “key achievements” made by Jerusalem over the past 12 months.

“These achievements included doubling investigations and notably, for the first time in a decade, indicting an alleged labor trafficker of foreign workers. The government formalized procedures for the identification of Palestinian trafficking victims and increased funding for overall protection services as well as the number of labor inspectors,” the report states.

It notes, however, that although Israel meets the minimum TVPA standards, there is still room for improvement, particularly in the area of labor trafficking.

The Israeli government “did not adequately hold labor traffickers criminally accountable with zero convictions for forced labor,” the report finds.

“The government’s efforts to increase the number of foreign workers resulted in agreements with countries that provided worker protections but also increased the use of private recruitment agencies, which did not provide adequate protections for workers.”

The report also includes a section on the West Bank and Gaza, although neither territory is given a tier placement, and it says the Palestinian Authority “did not comprehensively collect data on trafficking cases,” and that the “de facto authorities in Gaza [Hamas] were not functioning during the reporting period.”

Still, it says its findings indicate that Palestinians are exploited by human traffickers in both territories, and that women and children are vulnerable to forced labor, as are Palestinian laborers who work in Israel but live in the West Bank.

The report also notes that Palestinians trying to flee Gaza are vulnerable to trafficking along the shared border with Egypt, as high fees imposed by independent brokers and Egyptian and Hamas authorities alike leave them at risk of “trafficking through debt bondage and other exploitative practices.”