Special report: Israel and the Middle East

Suzanne Goldenberg in Jerusalem

Wednesday August 16, 2000

Police in Tel Aviv are hunting a serial arsonist attacking the city's sex industry after the horrific death of four women, locked inside a brothel which was set on fire overnight.

The attack, said by social workers to be the sixth of its kind in a week, added to the debate on the increasing traffic in women for prostitution by Russian and Israeli gangs, and the appalling treatment they suffer.

Social workers believe the dead women came from Ukraine, where most of those brought from the former soviet Union for prostitution are from.

The police said they were investigating the possibility that the fire might have been started by ultra-Orthodox Jews opposed to the sex industry.

"We are pursuing a number of courses of inquiry, both the possibility of a dispute between operators of these businesses and ... that extremist ultra-Orthodox Jews are responsible," the chief of police, Shlomo Aharonishky, said.

Earlier this year Amnesty International reported that 10,000 women from the former Soviet Union had been virtually enslaved in Israel in the past 10 years.  Many have forged documents identifying them as Jewish immigrants.

Promised earnings of $1,000 (£665) a month, they are routinely confined to flats, deprived of their passports, beaten and threatened with arrest as illegal immigrants.

Women's organisations say the police have become more aware of their plight in the past six months.  Until recently the authorities have been reluctant to prosecute the men involved, although 400 women are detained and deported every year.

Although most of them know they are coming to work as prostitutes, about 30% of the women arrive in response to job advertisements in Russian papers for waitresses and nurses, the Israeli Coalition against Trafficking in Women says.