With just five weeks to go until the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina, Israel’s already narrow delegation is facing bureaucratic hurdles that could shrink its representation significantly.

International Olympic Committee regulations demand that all athletes must be citizens of and hold a passport from the country they represent. But a new regulation enacted in Israel in 2023 means that citizens who don’t spend most of their lives in the country will instead be granted a travel document known as a teudat ma’avar.

Athletes who compete at the highest level in winter sports are essentially unable to spend most of their time in Israel, since it lacks adequate facilities for training. And Israeli Olympic officials say the problem is exacerbated by the fact that there is no sitting interior minister in Israel, after Shas’s Moshe Arbel quit and the candidacy of his temporary replacement, Yariv Levin, ended in October.

“This is a situation that I don’t think we’ve ever had before,” Yael Arad, the president of the Olympic Committee of Israel, told reporters in a Zoom press briefing on Wednesday. “We feel like our athletes are sort of held hostage” by the law.

Arad said the OCI has been “dealing with this for months” with the relevant government authorities, “asking, explaining, and — I don’t want to say — almost begging, yet we can’t manage to get a signature.”

A spokeswoman for the Population, Immigration and Border Authority told The Times of Israel on Wednesday that the passport issue “is not bureaucracy. It’s an issue that can only be approved by the minister, and there is no [interior] minister.”

To date, only four Israeli athletes have qualified for the upcoming games: figure skater Mariia Seniuk, cross-country skier

© The Times of Israel