Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday he was cancelling an agreement with the U.N. refugee agency to relocate thousands of African migrants, bowing to right-wing pressure to scrap the deal.
The agency, the UNHCR, said it hoped Israel would reconsider the decision soon and offered to work with it to identify and "respond to the protection needs" of asylum seekers in the country.
Netanyahu's critics seized on his backtracking on the arrangement — under which thousands of other migrants would have won the right to remain in Israel — as a sign of political weakness. The prime minister is the subject of police investigations into suspected corruption, which he denies.