Africans cannot live and work in their own continent because of the vampire leaders like Meles Zenawi.
(Associated Press) – Police on Monday detained about 200 Africans who infiltrated the country through the porous border with Egypt in recent months, a police official said, a day after Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ordered a crackdown on illegal migrants.
Israel Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said about 200 illegal migrants, mostly from Sudan, were arrested in a raid near the old bus station in Tel Aviv, where many of the immigrants live.
Rosenfeld said the arrests would continue this week.
The shelters that home migrants in southern Tel Aviv were nearly empty after the raid, with hundreds of barren mattresses laid side by side in smelly underground dwellings, as illegals kept a low profile to avoid arrest.
An Interior Ministry spokeswoman said those with permits would be released, and those whose refugee status is being reviewed by the UN would get a limited stay, while the others would be deported.
Solomon Mangstie-Dayan, a 40-year-old migrant from Ethiopia who crossed into Israel nine days ago, said police officers raided his shelter, seizing fellow African migrants and hurrying them onto three buses. He said he was spared only because of the cries of his 3-year-old daughter, Sunight.
Sigal Rozen, of the Hotline for Migrant Workers in Tel Aviv, who represents the migrants, said authorities were shipping some of the arrested migrants to a prison in southern Israel.
Government statistics show about 100,000 legal foreign workers in Israel. At least 100,000 others, many from Africa, work in Israel without permits, according to experts.
Africans have been sneaking into Israel in increasing numbers over the past year. More than 7,000 have entered the country illegally through its border with Egypt in just over a year, including more than 2,000 so far in 2008, said Michael Bavly, a representative in Israel of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Most are from Sudan – including southern Sudan, where a 22-year conflict left 2.5 million people dead, as well as Darfur, where a rebellion has cost more than 200,000 civilian lives and made 2.5 million homeless and Eritrea, where they fled forced conscription into the army for life.
This year, Israel granted temporary residency status to 600 refugees from Darfur. It also recognized about 2,000 infiltrators from Eritrea whose lives would be endangered if sent home.
Israel plans to deport the other 4,500, many of whom came from countries like Ivory Coast, Ghana and Nigeria.
Their route has been treacherous. Egyptian border police on Monday shot and wounded a Sudanese and a man from Ivory Coast in separate incidents as they tried to cross into Israel. On Sunday, Egyptian forces shot and killed an African woman who was trying to cross the border into Israel, a medical official said.
On Sunday, Olmert instructed the Public Security Ministry and the Interior Ministry to deport thousands of African asylum seekers who have sneaked into Israel though the Egyptian border.
He ordered security officials to tighten supervision of the Egyptian border and directed officials to expedite the processing of those seeking asylum, to decide which were just seeking work and could be deported.