No need yet for mandatory repatriation of Filipinos in Israel — DFA

The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) has not seen the need yet to impose Alert Level 4 status or mandatory repatriation of Filipinos in Israel.

According to DFA Undersecretary Eduardo Jose de Vega, the Alert Level 4 status is only “called when the country has broken down and the rule of law and everything about peace and order has broken down… throughout the country.”

“That is not the case in the state of Israel,” de Vega said at a public briefing.

He said fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas militants was only tense on Saturday, the first day of the attack, but “the situation has turned to certain sense of normalcy.”

Currently, de Vega said, the Israeli government is now only prohibiting deployment of foreign workers to Israel.

That for now is not the problem for the Philippines as the latter temporarily held off deployment of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) even before the war broke out.

“We’re not going to deploy new workers which is actually status quo anyway because we still have to negotiate…about caregivers and about the hotel workers by a G2G agreement/ government-to-government. And right now, there is no deployment,” he added.

But the Philippine government advised Filipinos in Israel to exercise precaution as war between Israel and Hamas is ongoing.