JERUSALEM: Thai laborers employed on Israeli farms suffer from low pay, dangerous working conditions and very long hours, Human Rights Watch said in a report published on Wednesday.

According to the 48-page report entitled: “A Raw Deal: Abuses of Thai Workers in Israel’s Agricultural Sector,” the 25,000 Thais employed in the Jewish state are working in conditions which contravene Israeli law. Workers must tolerate “low pay, excessive working hours, hazardous working conditions and poor housing,” it said.

“The success of Israel’s agricultural industry depends to a large extent on the labor of Thai migrant workers, but Israel is doing far too little to uphold their rights and protect them from exploitation,” the New York-based organization said.

“Israeli authorities need to be much more active in enforcing the law on working hours and conditions, and in clamping down on employers who abuse workers’ rights.”

The report’s authors interviewed 173 Thai workers in 10 separate farming communities across Israel.

“All said that they were paid less than the legal minimum wage, forced to work far more hours than the legal limit, exposed to unsafe working conditions, and had difficulties if they tried to change employers.”

In nine of the communities, the workers were housed in “makeshift and inadequate” accommodation, it said.

But The Workers Hotline, an Israeli NGO, said the report supported its own findings.

“The Israeli agricultural sector is a greenhouse for violations of migrant workers’ labor and human rights,” it said in a statement.

“Lack of enforcement has become a key component in the horrendous situation of migrant workers in this field, as reflected in the (HRW) report.”

Separately, US House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday to address a joint meeting of Congress on Feb. 11.

“In this time of challenge, I am asking the prime minister to address Congress on the grave threats radical Islam and Iran pose to our security and way of life,” Boehner said in a statement. The invitation came a day after US President Barack Obama said in his State of the Union address he would veto legislation that toughens sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program.