Israel rejects BBC claims of mistreatment of Thai workers, mysterious deaths

Israel rejects today a Friday report by the UK’s BBC news network that claimed that Thai agricultural workers in Israel are kept in conditions that threaten their health and safety.

A joint statement issued by the health, foreign affairs, agriculture, welfare and interior ministries calls the BBC report “distorted.”

“We strongly reject the unprecedented allegations reported by the BBC concerning the terms of employment of Thai workers in Israel,” the statement says. “These claims portray a distorted picture of reality.”

The report claimed many Thai agricultural workers in Israel are living in squalid conditions, are underpaid, and are exposed to work hazards from pesticides without proper protection.

The Israeli statement says authorities have deployed “professional enforcement units…to supervise the employment of foreign workers, workplace safety, health and compliance with the state’s labor laws.”

It notes that the Thai workers’ employment agreement has been described by the International Organization for Migration as “a successful creation that has regulated and eased the employee recruitment process, reduced possibilities of collecting illegal payments from employment seekers and protected workers’ rights. Surveys conducted by the IOM to date show that 95% of the workers believe the agreement is ‘good to excellent.'”

And it utterly rejects the BBC’s claims of unexplained deaths among the Thai workers.

The response notes: “It should be stressed that the Ministry of Health received in recent years reports of sudden death of Thai workers during sleep. The issue was investigated by the public health services in cooperation with the National Institute of Forensic Medicine. The investigation, which included the dispatch of a senior medical team to Thailand, confirmed the hypothesis of the sudden deaths as a result of Brugada syndrome. The results of the Ministry of Health investigation show that a significant number of the cases of death during sleep were caused by a genetic syndrome common to Thailand in general and a certain number of tribes living in the north-eastern part of the country in particular. This syndrome has been also been noted amongst other Thai workers, not necessarily in the agricultural sector, in other countries around the world.”