Nufar Bar, an Israeli immigration lawyer living in Porto who works with the Portuguese law firm Cotarelli e Rodrigues, says his firm gets requests from Israelis seeking refugee status “almost every day,” according to The Times of Israel.
“No official information about the number of Israelis applying for asylum in Portugal can be found online and repeated requests for comment from the Portuguese authorities went unanswered,” the publication wrote.
That information is also lacking for Palestinian refugees in Portugal.
Portugal received 2,992 asylum applications by refugees in 2023 as of July, according to the Asylum Information Database. Of those, 332 were from Afghanistan, 315 from Gambia, and 253 from Colombia, the top three countries of origin. From Israel, there were 129, which was the same as from Iraq.
