Air tickets were presented to 204 Sri Lankan migrant workers bound for jobs in Israel at a ceremony at the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE) auditorium on Thursday, September 18, the Daily Mirror reported. The tickets were handed over under the patronage of SLBFE Chairman Kosala Wickramasinghe.
The batch is overwhelmingly restaurant work
The 204 workers break down across four sectors:
| Sector | Workers |
|---|---|
| Restaurant | 144 |
| Hotel | 43 |
| Industrial | 16 |
| Agricultural | 1 |
| Total | 204 |
Restaurant jobs account for 71% of the batch — more than the other three sectors combined. The single agricultural placement is the outlier: one worker in a category that, on the Bureau’s own cumulative figures below, has moved only 20 people in total.
Two sets of numbers that do not add up to each other
The SLBFE also gave a sector breakdown of departures as of August 31, 2026: 997 for housekeeping, 800 for industrial-sector jobs, 97 for restaurant work and 20 for agriculture.
Those four figures total 1,914. The Bureau separately put the overall number of Sri Lankans who have left for employment in Israel at 11,607.
The Daily Mirror does not say what period the 1,914 covers, and the gap between the two totals is not explained. The most likely reading is that the sector breakdown is a current-year or current-programme count while 11,607 is the cumulative figure for the corridor, but the report does not state this — and the two numbers sit in consecutive paragraphs with nothing to distinguish them. Readers should not treat 1,914 as a subset of 11,607 on the strength of this report alone.
One point is clear from the breakdown: housekeeping is the single largest category in the cumulative count at 997, yet no housekeeping placements appear in Thursday’s batch of 204 at all.
The restaurant pipeline is delivering; the renovation one is not visible
The composition of this batch is the more telling detail when set against the Bureau’s own recruitment drive.
The SLBFE opened its registration portal on August 10 for 16,000 Israel places — 4,000 in the restaurant sector and 12,000 in renovation trades across putty and gypsum work, sunk box and block stone construction, plastering and ceramic tiling.
Six weeks later, the restaurant half of that drive is visibly producing departures: 144 restaurant workers in a single batch, against a cumulative restaurant figure of just 97 at the end of August. The renovation half — three times larger at 12,000 places — does not appear in this batch in any form. Neither renovation nor construction is among the four sectors listed. The Daily Mirror does not report where that recruitment stands.
Scam warning repeated
The Bureau again warned the public about fraudulent schemes advertising Israeli jobs and urged people not to fall victim to them. Scams can be reported on the SLBFE hotline 1989, and the Bureau said genuine vacancy information is published on its official website.
That warning is routine in SLBFE announcements, but it tracks a real pattern of prosecutions — this site has covered foreign-employment rackets involving a Rs. 920 million Romania job scam, a Canada NGO jobs racket and a fake-ID fraud in Yakkala.
A note on the chairman’s name
The Daily Mirror spells the SLBFE chairman “Kosala Wickramasinghe.” Other outlets and this site’s earlier coverage of the Israel corridor spell it “Koshala Wickramasinghe.” Same person; the spelling is not settled across Sri Lankan newsrooms.
Not reported
The Daily Mirror does not give the departure date for the 204 workers, their contract length, wage terms or the employers involved, and does not say which Israeli recruitment phase they were selected under.
It does not explain the period covered by the 1,914-worker sector breakdown, reconcile it with the 11,607 total, or say how many of the 16,000 places advertised in August have now been filled. There is no figure for how many Sri Lankans are currently working in Israel as opposed to how many have left for it — a distinction that matters in a corridor where contracts run for years.
No comment from the Israeli side is reported, and there is no indication whether the regional security situation has affected placement volumes.
