Two illegal aliens were caught on Sunday morning in the Jordan Valley community of Yardena when a resident found them in his garden. They had crossed the Jordanian border and the entire moshav before being discovered.
The two illegal aliens, who were Sri Lankan, aroused the resident’s suspicion after asking for water, Israeli news site N12 reported. He alerted police, who summoned soldiers to the scene.
Nir, the Yardena resident, told N12 that he was getting his children ready for school when he saw them. “They didn’t look threatening, but like ordinary workers,” he said. They asked for water and to charge their phone.
“I brought them coffee and cookies, and my wife began to be suspicious,” Nir said. He tried to question them regarding where they worked. They stammered.
“I understood that they were from Sri Lanka but I didn’t understand what was going on here. I called the community policeman, who connected me to the army. They arrived very quickly and took the reins,” he said.
An IDF spokesperson said that there was no fear of a security incident. The army confirmed that the two infiltrators were migrant workers, adding that they had been transferred to the security forces for further questioning. “The incident is being investigated,” the spokesperson said.
The incident follows a similar one on Saturday morning, when a Jordanian, who turned out to be a migrant worker, crossed the border and infiltrated the area of Kibbutz Sha’ar HaGolan and Kibbutz Masada in the Jordan Valley. Civilians caught the intruder. No alert was activated when he crossed the border.
The heads of the regional councils along the Jordan border have warned for years that the border is porous and can be easily crossed.
In October of last year, two terrorists from Jordan, members of the Muslim Brotherhood, crossed the border and carried out a shooting attack near Moshav Neot HaKikar in the northern Arava Valley. Two soldiers were wounded before the terrorists were killed.
In 2024, Giora Eiland, former head of the Israel National Security Council, warned of a resurgence of terrorist activity from Jordan. “Jordan is marked by Iran as the next country in which it will establish a military terror infrastructure against Israel,” Eiland warned Ynet.
The Israeli Immigration Policy Center, an NGO founded in 2012 to “promote immigration policy which serves the strategic interests of the State of Israel,” issued a report in 2023 warning that illegal immigration across the Jordan border was on the threshold of an exponential increase, similar to what happened through the Egyptian border before Israel built a large barrier in 2010.