Some 3,000 African invaders posing as “asylum seekers” who have illegally entered Israel have been forced to leave Tel Aviv in terms of a ruling by the Israeli Ministry of the Interior.
The ruling permits asylum seekers to reside and work only in towns and cities north of Hadera and south of Gedera, about an hour’s drive from Tel Aviv. The ruling was initially imposed only on recent invaders but in recent months asylum seekers living in Israel for longer periods have experienced the same constraints on their work permits, forcing them to leave their homes.
Unemployment is rife in Israel’s south and north while in Tel Aviv asylum seekers can find menial jobs as street-sweepers or restaurant workers. Tel Aviv also has the one school in Israel that caters to the special needs of asylum seekers’ children – the Bialik Elementary and High School in southern Tel Aviv.
On 17 February, the asylum seekers protested in Tel Aviv against this regulation. Holding banners and chanting slogans, they asked the government to allow them to remain in Israel’s main city.
Israel has of late been inundated with bogus African asylum seekers crossing into its territory from sub-Saharan Africa. All have crossed multiple safe countries on their way to Israel, and therefore have not qualified for asylum in Israel under any international law.
According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Israeli police in Tel Aviv arrested over 240 asylum seekers – mostly from Eritrea, Sudan and Côte d’Ivoire – in one day in February. This mass arrest took place one day after Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ordered security forces to step up measures to “prevent the infiltration of foreigners and deport those staying illegally.”
Nearly all of those arrested had some sort of documentation from the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) showing their cases were under review.
Those arrested were told by police they could wait for their interviews with the UN while in jail, according to lawyers from Israeli non-governmental groups trying to aid the asylum seekers.
During the weekly cabinet meeting on 24 February, President Olmert ordered the Israel Prisons Service to detain all infiltrators not classified as refugees, and instructed the Defence Ministry to tighten security at the Israeli-Egypt border.
However, Defence Minister Ehud Barak rejected President Olmert’s suggestion that the military relax its “open fire” policy (the Israeli military’s rules of engagement) along the border, a move that would have made it easier to fire live ammunition at people trying to sneak into the country. Instead, he said Israel should implement the “hot return” policy, whereby asylum seekers and others would be immediately sent back to Egypt upon capture.
Meanwhile, on the Egyptian side of the border there appear to be less stringent regulations on the use of live ammunition by the authorities, as media reports indicated that in many instances migrants crossing the border were shot at by police, in some cases resulting in death.
The UNHCR has estimated that 7,400 people, mostly Africans, have crossed into Israel in the past three years, with most coming in the past ten months. Recent weeks have seen a surge in the number of people crossing the border.
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