By Douglas Hamilton
TEL AVIV |
(Reuters) - African migrants chosen for deportation from Israel were nervously awaiting a knock on the door or a tap on the shoulder on Tuesday as immigration officials rounded up hundreds for departure flights due to begin at the weekend.
"The people are very tense. It's pretty traumatic," said Jacob Berri, a spokesman for the South Sudanese community of migrants, the first to be repatriated under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's emergency plan.
"There are children here who only speak Hebrew. They won't even know the language where they're going," Berri said.
Africans were being stopped on the street and issued deportation orders, he added. "About 100 more have been arrested this morning."
Many of the migrants have been working in hotels and restaurants, while others have been holding down manual jobs or working as contracted day labor. All of them were technically working illegally.
Israeli opinion is divided over plans to eventually deport some 60,000 African migrants deemed a social irritant and a threat to the Jewish character of the state. A columnist in the daily Yedioth Ahronoth called it "hysteria". Another in the same paper said the methods may be "needlessly brutal" but it was necessary.
The first deportation flight is expected to leave Israel on Sunday for Juba, the capital of South Sudan, as part of what Israel calls Operation Returning Home.
Detentions began on Sunday in the Red Sea resort of Eilat, where Israeli television filmed weeping African women and men in handcuffs. Those detained were sent to the Saharonim detention facility in the Negev Desert, close to where they first entered Israel over the porous Sinai Desert border with Egypt.
The South Sudanese, whose country was established in 2011 after they fled civil war in Sudan five or six years ago, will be the first to be repatriated, under an agreement between South Sudan and Israel. They number only some 1,500.
"The next stage is the removal from Israel of all the infiltrators from Eritrea and Sudan, whose number comes close to 50,000 people," said Interior Minister Eli Yishai.
It is legally questionable whether Israel can actually remove all of the migrants and some critics have said the government's tough rhetoric is far removed from reality.
"At the moment, we are permitted only to deport from Israel the citizens of South Sudan and the Ivory Coast," the minister was quoted as saying.
"I hear those who say these infiltrators cannot be sent back, but this is an important mission ...saying "No" is tantamount to shelving the declaration of independence, the end of the Zionist dream," said Yishai, who heads a religious party.
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South Sudanese who agree to deportation within five days will receive a grant of 1,000 euros. Those who do not are interned until they can be forcibly repatriated.
"We have arrested about 140 infiltrators up until last night, a main portion of whom are South Sudanese," senior immigration official Yossi Edelstein told Israel Radio.
"There is also an impressive movement in the South Sudanese community of people coming to us to leave on their own free will. About 100 people have come forward to register..."
Israel, a country of 7.8 million, has almost completed a high fence along the border to deter more would-be migrants who are brought to the frontier by Bedouin people-smugglers.
Newspaper reports said Netanyahu had asked officials to examine whether a fence should now also be built along the border with southern Jordan, in the event that migrants try to cross the narrow Gulf of Aqaba and enter Israel from the Arab kingdom.
An Eilat hotel director said the expulsions were "a terrible shame". "�Most of them are educated people who fled from a bloody war in their homeland. They speak a number of languages, most of them are Christian, and they did their job in the best way possible," David Blum of Isrotel was quoted as saying.
Thousands of Palestinians used to come into Israel daily from the West Bank and Gaza to do mostly minimum-wage jobs. But tight security provisions to prevent attacks by Palestinian militants ended that mutually beneficial arrangement years ago.
Netanyahu says legislation to stop the illegal hiring of Africans would now be strictly enforced.
Despite claims of rampant crime in sections of south Tel Aviv where most Africans live, a senior police commander, David Gez, was quoted as saying the level of crime among the migrants was relatively low.�
(Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell; Edited by Andrew Osborn)
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