Israel to Send African Illegal Immigrants to Detention Camps

Israel to Send African Illegal Immigrants to Detention Camps

Tel Aviv, Jun 8 (Prensa Latina) Israel's Interior Minister Eli Yishai said on Friday that he hopes to start soon the moving of thousands of illegal African immigrants to a detention camp which he called "tent city."

Yishai, leader of the ultraorthodox SHAS party, said that an Israeli court cleared the way on Thursday for the deportation of an estimated 1,500 South Sudanese, after ruling that their lives were no longer threatened in the recently created nation.

The Interior Minister told public radio that 40,000 Sudanese and Eritreans were next to be transferred from Tel Aviv, Eilat, and other Israeli zones to the detention camps.

"There are still about 15,000 immigrants from north Sudan and some 35,000 from Eritrea, and I am not allowed to get them out at the moment," said the minister, who expects that legal obstacles would be removed to deport the African immigrants.

Yishai said that Israel is building detention camps for sub-Saharan illegal immigrants, and a tent city would be completed in few months, noting that the construction plan is estimated at about $6.7 million USD.

He added that a first step is to transfer the illegal immigrants to a detention center that is being built in south Israel, and once it is completed, they will start the immigrants from Tel Aviv and Eliat, in the Red Sea coast.

Interior ministry statistics show that approximately 60,000 African immigrants have entered Israel illegally, the vast majority of them from Sudan and Eritrea.

sus/ajs/rmh/ucl Modificado el ( viernes, 08 de junio de 2012 )

=========================================
WALTER LIPPMANN
Los Angeles, California
Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
"Cuba - Un Paraíso bajo el bloqueo"