Mother Can't Change Mind: Can a woman who agrees to relocate to Israel with her husband and children, from the States, change her mind a year later, and decide not to return with the minors, at the end of a summer holiday in their native country , just before they start their second year in Israeli school – or would this be "child abduction"

A definitive answer would depend on the particular circumstances of the case, whether , for example, her agreement was conditioned or not, whether this can be proved, and whether the children had in fact become habitually resident in Israel. However, assuming the mother's agreement was not conditioned in a clear, provable way, if the family relocated to Israel and lived there for a year, then Israel would have become the children's place of habitual residence. Accordingly, the mother would not be entitled to make a unilateral decision, and wrongfully retain the children abroad, in contravention of the joint parental decision to relocate to Israel . Her failure to return them to Israel, their new country of habitual residence, would constitute child abduction , under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of Child Abduction, which binds both the U.S.A. and Israel. Her change of heart could not undo the legal situation whereby the children's country of habitual residence had changed from the U.S. to Israel. In this connection, in 2003, in the U.S. Silverman appeal court judgment where a Hague Convention return order to Israel was granted by the U.S. appeal court for the 8th Circuit, it was held that the mother's "post-move desire to return to the United States, and the finding by the district court that she was subjected to coercion and abuse beginning two months after her arrival, does not change the legal conclusion that the habitual residence of the children changed from Minnesota to Israel. "