Israel seeks to stem stream of African migrants
TEL AVIV — In a foul-smelling, windowless space under an apartment house in a seedy part of town, more than 100 African migrants sleep side by side on wall-to-wall mattresses in a crammed subterranean shelter.
At another migrant hostel nearby, a building that once served as a massage parlor, women picked through piles of donated clothing on a recent afternoon and men lay sleeping, jammed into a stuffy attic.
Cans of food lined a windowsill, along with clothes hung to dry. A few egg rolls contributed by someone lay unclaimed in a box, and in the stairwell, piles of ragged bedding marked places where people had spent the night.
The shelters, tucked among shabby shops selling cheap clothing, CDs and mobile phones near the old central bus station in southern Tel Aviv, are the grim face of Israel's burgeoning migrant problem, a humanitarian challenge the government has been slow to address.
The Africans are sneaking in across the porous desert border between Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and Israel's southern Negev region. The first to come three years ago were Sudanese, including people from the war-torn region of Darfur, but now they are mostly from Eritrea, as well as from the Ivory Coast, Nigeria and a scattering of other countries. The stream of illegal arrivals has swelled this year, with more than 2,000 coming in since January, according to Israeli and United Nations officials.
The newcomers, who now number more than 7,000, are seeking asylum as refugees, putting Israel in an unfamiliar position that Western nations have been coping with for years. After decades of war with its Arab neighbors, Israel is unaccustomed to being a magnet for asylum seekers.
At a Cabinet meeting last week, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called the wave of African migrants a "tsunami" that could grow even larger, and he ordered the army to return the infiltrators as soon as they cross the border.
Africans who make the risky crossing—several have been killed this year by Egyptian border guards—are usually picked up by Israeli army patrols, detained for days or even months and then released, left in limbo without work permits or residence papers. Many have applied for refugee status at the Israel office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
