Sri Lanka has resumed sending workers to Israel after flight disruptions caused by Middle East unrest eased, the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment said on Thursday.
A group of 47 Sri Lankans — 42 women and five men — departed for Israel on May 7, the 202nd batch sent under the bilateral programme. All had secured employment in the caregiving sector, the SLBFE said.
SLBFE Chairman Koshala Wickramasinghe urged the departing workers to fulfil their responsibilities, prioritise their health and use their earnings to build long-term financial stability for their return to Sri Lanka.
The resumption is the first confirmed restart of SLBFE-managed deployments to Israel since the Iran-Israel war forced widespread Middle East flight cancellations and rerouting in recent weeks. Air links between Colombo and Tel Aviv had been intermittent during the conflict, with several Gulf-routing carriers temporarily pulling capacity. Coverage on this site of the BBC’s “triple-blow” assessment and British Airways’ Middle East cuts tracked the air-network shock through April.
Israel has been a steady caregiving-sector destination for Sri Lankan workers for over a decade and is one of the highest-paying corridors managed by the Bureau. The 202-batch tally suggests a programme operating at consistent volumes prior to the war disruption. Foreign employment remains a major component of Sri Lanka’s external earnings; the resumption is also the latest in a string of corridor-specific normalisations alongside the restart of the South Korea E-8 seasonal scheme.
Source: Newswire.
