Via Uruknet:

Dubai is of course not the only place in the Middle East famous for sex-trafficking; it faces stiff competition from Israel. BBC reports, in 2006 ‘the United Nations named Israel as one of the main destinations in the world for trafficked women; it has also consistently appeared as an offender in the annual US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons (Tip) report.’

Marina rarely leaves her two-room home in northern Israel these days. She is in hiding - wanted by the Israeli authorities for being an illegal immigrant, and by the criminal gangs who brought her here to sell her into prostitution.

Marina - not her real name - was lured to Israel by human traffickers.

During the height of the phenomenon, from the beginning of the 1990s to the early years of 2000, an estimated 3,000 women a year were brought to Israel on the false promise of jobs and a better way of life.

“When I was in the Ukraine, I had a difficult life,” said Marina, who came to Israel in 1999 at the age of 33 after answering a newspaper advertisement offering the opportunity to study abroad.

“I was taken to an apartment in Ashkelon, and other women there told me I was now in prostitution. I became hysterical, but a guy starting hitting me and then others there raped me.

“I was then taken to a place where they sold me - just sold me!” she said, recalling how she was locked in a windowless basement for a month, drank water from a toilet and was deprived of food.

MAIN ORIGINS OF WOMEN TRAFFICKED TO ISRAEL

-Russia
-Moldova
-Ukraine
-Uzbekistan
-Belarus

That part of her ordeal only ended when she managed to escape, but the physical and mental scars remain.

Last year, the United Nations named Israel as one of the main destinations in the world for trafficked women; it has also consistently appeared as an offender in the annual US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons (Tip) report.

Read the rest of the report here.

From SOS Sexisme -

Trafficking in Eastern European women is a huge business, bringing from $ 5 billion to $ 22 billion a year to the sex industry’s tycoons. The risks are lower and the profits higher than from drug smuggling, according to a recent report by the British Helsinki Human Rights Group. A woman can be resold and utilized until she dies or goes mad, which is often the case, said Marie-Jose Ragab, president of the Dulles Area Chapter of the National Organization for Women.

She said worse lies ahead for those who reach Turkey. There they are delivered to a market in the Turkish city of Trebizond, where they are literally bought and sold as slaves.

From Bosnia to Israel, women are sold for anything from $800 to $15,000, depending on the quality of the “product” and remain obligated by large debts for their transportation and the arrangement of documents, according to Human Rights Watch.

An article from the JPost lists Israel as one of the worst human traffickers -

A report released this week by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has cited Israel as among the top destinations in the trafficking of human beings, either for sexual exploitation or forced labor.

Entitled “Trafficking in Persons: Global Patterns,” the report claims that, “virtually every country in the world is affected by the crime of human trafficking.” However, Israel, along with nine countries, was named as the worst offenders of illegal trade in human beings.

“The fact that this form of slavery still exists in the 21st century shames us all,” announced UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa on the organization’s Web site. “Governments need to get serious about identifying the full extent of the problem so they can get serious about eliminating it.”

In Israel, Haifa feminist center Isha L’Isha, one of the human rights organizations active in the fight against the trafficking of women, welcomed the report’s findings and was hopeful that it would force the government and relevant authorities to take more action against this crime.

Tal Eisenberg, the organization’s legal advisor and coordinator for the center’s Fighting Against Trafficking in Women project told The Jerusalem Post, “It is excellent that the United Nations has recognized that there is such a problem in Israel. I hope that we can learn from the report and that the government will now take more notice of the problem.” She said that many countries did not even know that trafficking takes place within their borders and that Israeli rights organizations had made great progress in combating the problem.

Executive Director of Amnesty International Israel, Amnon Vidan said that the Israeli authorities had to deal with the problem before it happened, by stopping the transit of women across the border with Egypt.

The UNODC report identified 127 countries of origin, 98 transit countries and 137 destination countries. It stated that the vast majority of human trafficking was in women and was for the purpose of sexual exploitation, with roughly 20 percent of the trade being in forced labor.

The report, which was based on 113 individual sources such as government documents, research by national criminal justice organizations, Interpol, research institutes and news agencies, suggested that, “the best way of addressing the demand side of trafficking human beings is to demolish the markets generating profits to the criminals. This would require identification of traffickers in order to be able to investigate trafficking cases, and prosecute and convict offenders. Unfortunately, relatively few cases are prosecuted successfully resulting in a very small number of convictions.”

From the BBC -

Between 3,000 and 5,000 women have been smuggled into Israel in the past four years to work as prostitutes, according to a parliamentary inquiry.

The report described how the women are sold at public auctions for as much as $10,000 and forced to work up to 18 hours a day.

On average the women receive only three percent of the money they earn from prostitution, the report said.

Most of the women are from the former Soviet Union.

Many are raped and beaten as they are smuggled into Israel over the Egyptian border, the inquiry found.

Read more.