With clock ticking, Israel moves to resolve passport crisis for Winter Olympians

With just days until the deadline, Israel took a key step Wednesday to enable more than half of its Winter Olympics delegation to be granted Israeli passports that would allow them to compete in Milano Cortina next month, resolving a months-long saga.

The Knesset voted 16-9 to approve a cabinet decision made Sunday to temporarily transfer some of the powers of the interior minister to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, enabling him to issue passports to the athletes in question.

Now, with just days left on the clock, Netanyahu will have to approve the passports, the Interior Ministry must print them and the athletes collect them before the final Olympic registration closes on January 26. The opening ceremony of the Winter Games is scheduled for February 6.

While all of Israel’s Winter Olympians are citizens, a number of them hold only a travel document known as a teudat ma’avar, after a regulation passed in 2023 mandated that immigrants can receive a full passport only after a year of residency during which they prove that the center of their life is in Israel.

Only the interior minister has the authority to grant an Israeli passport to those who do not automatically qualify under the law. There has been no sitting interior minister since October, when Yariv Levin’s temporary tenure ended. He had been appointed to the post in July after Shas’s Moshe Arbel quit the cabinet along with the rest of his party.

“We are very good at running to the podium when one of our athletes wins a medal,” said Yesh Atid MK Simon Davidson – a former competitive swimmer – to the Knesset plenum ahead of Wednesday’s vote. “The Israeli flag is raised and ‘Hatikvah’ is played. But until we get to the flag and the anthem, there is a very long road whose magnitude you don’t even understand.”

Davidson slammed the government for arriving at this situation, “where there is no interior minister, no health minister, no welfare minister, no religious services minister – how messed up can things be?”

The Shas and United Torah Judaism parties quit their cabinet roles in July in protest of the government’s failure to pass legislation exempting Haredi men from military service. Netanyahu did not appoint permanent replacements in the hope of convincing the parties to ultimately return.

Netanyahu himself cannot take on the full role of interior minister, because he is prohibited from holding any ministerial portfolio since he has been indicted on criminal charges.

Three of the athletes expected to compete at the 2026 Winter Olympics – figure skater Mariia Seniuk, cross-country skier Attila Mehaly Kertesz and skeleton athlete Jared Firestone – don’t have a full Israeli passport in hand, according to Olympic officials. Athletes who compete at the highest level in winter sports spend most of the year training outside of the country, since Israel lacks the necessary facilities, and they therefore cannot prove full-time residency.

“The State of Israel is turning its immigrants into second-class citizens,” said Yisrael Beytenu MK Oded Forer, acting chair of the Knesset Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs Committee, during a committee discussion on the issue on Monday.

“It has become clear that there is a need to ease the bureaucracy facing immigrant athletes so they can represent Israel in international competitions,” Forer added. “The moment these athletes win a medal, ministers will rush to congratulate them and pose for photos — but they do not assist them in the process beforehand.”

The Yisrael Beytenu opposition party, whose base of support is made up of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, bitterly opposed the decision in 2023 to stop providing passports upon immigrants’ arrival in the country.

With just weeks until the opening ceremony, the final makeup of Israel’s small delegation is not yet clear. Four athletes have officially qualified – Seniuk, Kertesz and alpine skiing siblings Noa and Barnabas Szollos. Firestone has met the criteria to compete in skeleton, although the official invitation won’t come before Sunday, when the qualification period ends.

Meanwhile, the bobsleigh team, headed by AJ Edelman, did not outright qualify for the Olympics but could still receive a reallocated spot once the qualification period closes. The Olympic Committee of Israel would then have to approve sending the four-man team to Milano Cortina, doubling the delegation’s size.