Israel has admitted for the first time that it has been giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth-control injections, often without their knowledge or consent.

The government had previously denied the practice but the Israeli Health Ministry’s director-general has now ordered gynaecologists to stop administering the drugs. According a report in Haaretz, suspicions were first raised by an investigative journalist, Gal Gabbay, who interviewed more than 30 women from Ethiopia in an attempt to discover why birth rates in the community had fallen dramatically.

One of the Ethiopian women who was interviewed is quoted as saying: “They [medical staff] told us they are inoculations. We took it every three months. We said we didn’t want to.” It is alleged that some of the women were forced or coerced to take the drug while in transit camps in Ethiopia.

This weekend, a report revealing that African women immigrating to Israel were subjected to mandatory contraceptive injections, effectively amounting to forced (if temporary) sterilization made global headlines. 

Take $3,500 and a one-way ticket to Africa by April, or face forced deportation or jail.

This is Israel's new plan for thousands of East African migrants, mostly from Eritrea and Sudan, who crossed the Sinai Desert into Israel over the last decade.

The policy, announced Jan. 1, has sparked panic among migrants, who say they took perilous journeys to Israel seeking refuge from hardship, and it has been criticized by the U.N. Refugee Agency. The issue has also renewed an emotional debate among Israelis about whether their country owes the migrants safe haven.

     Decades of frustration boiled over on the streets of Tel Aviv and across Israel, as thousands of Ethiopian Jews marched against discrimination in a series of protests. It wasn’t the first time this community has taken to the streets, but now they have the country’s attention, following a viral video that showed two Israeli police officers beating an Ethiopian-Israeli soldier in uniform. Both officers were fired.  

     The video was a tipping point, and a symptom of a much bigger problem. Ethiopian Jews say they are treated like second-class