With just days until the deadline, Israel took a key step Wednesday to enable more than half of its Winter Olympics delegation to be granted Israeli passports that would allow them to compete in Milano Cortina next month, resolving a months-long saga.

The Knesset voted 16-9 to approve a cabinet decision made Sunday to temporarily transfer some of the powers of the interior minister to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, enabling him to issue passports to the athletes in question.

Now, with just days left on the clock, Netanyahu will have to approve the passports, the Interior Ministry must print them and the athletes collect them before the final Olympic registration closes on January 26. The opening ceremony of the Winter Games is scheduled for February 6.

While all of Israel’s Winter Olympians are citizens, a number of them hold only a travel document known as a teudat ma’avar, after a regulation passed in 2023 mandated that immigrants can receive a full passport only after a year of residency during which they prove that the center of their life is in Israel.

Only the interior minister has the authority to grant an Israeli passport to those who do not automatically qualify under the law. There has been no sitting interior minister since October, when Yariv Levin’s temporary tenure ended. He had been appointed to the post in July after Shas’s Moshe Arbel quit the cabinet along with........

© The Times of Israel