The U.S. State Department returned Israel to the highest rank of countries fighting human trafficking on Thursday in its annual report on the practice.
In its 2026 “Trafficking in Persons Report,” the department counted Israel among the 33 “tier one” countries that are doing the most to stop forced labor and sexual exploitation after a five-year period in which the Jewish state was listed in the “tier two” list.
Second tier countries do not meet the U.S. minimum legal standards for halting human trafficking.
Yariv Levin, deputy Israeli prime minister and minister of justice, welcomed the report.
“After a term of intensive work, we have achieved full recognition of Israel’s status as a global leader in the fight against human trafficking,” he stated.
The State Department report notes that a “tier one” rating “does not mean that a country has no human trafficking problem or that it is doing enough to address the crime.” Instead, it means that it “has made efforts to address the problem, such as demonstrating appreciable progress each year in combating trafficking.”
The individual country report for Israel notes that its upgraded status was the result of “doubling investigations and notably, for the first time in a decade, indicting an alleged labor trafficker of foreign workers.”
The Jewish state also formalized procedures for identifying Palestinian trafficking victims and made other improvements, according to the report.
But the report said that while Israel “meets the minimum standards” for tier one inclusion, “it did not adequately hold labor traffickers criminally accountable” and had “zero convictions for forced labor.”
The State Department also reported on the efforts, or lack thereof, from the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to combat human trafficking under the “West Bank and Gaza” section of the Israel report.
It notes that under Hamas, “husbands coerced their wives into commercial sex in Gaza, at times amounting to sex trafficking,” and that it and other terrorist groups “allegedly recruit and use child soldiers” in the enclave.
