Israel implements plan to expel African migrants

Israelis take part in a demonstration titled the "March of Shame", as they protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and government corruption in the coastal city of Tel Aviv on December 23, 2017. (AFP)
Updated 04 January 2018
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Israel implements plan to expel African migrants

JERUSALEM: Israel on Wednesday began implementing a plan to force tens of thousands of African migrants out of the country by April, threatening to arrest those who stay.
“This plan will get under way today,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the start of a cabinet meeting.
Under the program, some 38,000 migrants who entered Israel illegally, mainly Eritreans and Sudanese, will have until the end of March to leave.
Each will receive a plane ticket and $3,500 (2,900 euros) to do so. After the deadline, this amount will decrease and those who continue to refuse to go will face arrest.
Holot, an open facility in Israel’s desert south that can host 1,200 migrants who are allowed to leave to work during the day, is also set to be closed.
It currently holds 970 people, the interior ministry said this week.
The plan was originally approved by the cabinet in November, drawing concern from the UN refugee agency.

Wednesday’s cabinet session marked the program’s transition from the planning stage to action, migrant aid worker Adi Drori-Avraham told AFP.
“We see here the implementation of the decision,” said Drori-Avraham of the Tel Aviv-based Aid Organization for Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Israel (ASSAF).
The Africans currently hold short-term residence visas which must be renewed every two months.
“From today when a person goes to request an extension to their visa, if he does not have a pending asylum application... his visa will not be renewed and he will be given a deportation order,” she added.
She said that under the new regulations there was also an option for the authorities “not even to threaten them with a choice of voluntary departure or jail, simply to seize them and take them to a plane.”
“At the moment there are exceptions for women, children, parents of children and victims of human trafficking, but the procedural rules make it clear that those exemptions are only temporary,” she added.
In his comments to the cabinet and media, Netanyahu defended the plan.
“Every country must maintain its borders, and protecting the borders from illegal infiltration is both a right and a basic duty of a sovereign state,” he said.
But Tsgahans Goytiom, a 30-year-old Eritrean in south Tel Aviv, said he felt that he and his fellow refugees were being treated like commodities.
“I see the situation now as very bad and difficult,” he told AFP in Hebrew. “We are being traded.”
“I am not from Uganda or Rwanda,” he added. “How come the prime minister decided to send people to other countries?“
Israel tacitly recognizes that the Sudanese and Eritreans cannot be returned to their dangerous homelands, so it has signed deals with Rwanda and Uganda, which agree to accept departing migrants on condition they consent to the arrangement, activists say.
A 2016 UN commission of inquiry into Eritrea’s harsh regime found “widespread and systematic” crimes against humanity and said an estimated 5,000 people flee the country each month.
The International Criminal Court has indicted Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide related to his regime’s counter-insurgency tactics in the 14-year-old conflict in Darfur.
Migrants started coming in large numbers across the porous border between Israel and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula in 2007, when nearly 5,000 entered, interior ministry figures show.
The government has since completed fencing the border and deploying electronic sensors. In the first six months of last year, no one made it across.
Over the years, those caught at the Egyptian frontier were detained at prisons in the Negev desert in southern Israel.
On release they were given bus tickets to Tel Aviv, arriving at the central bus station on the south side of the city, where many have since remained.
Israeli residents of southern Tel Aviv have long complained of their presence and right-wing politicians have pledged to heed calls to force them out, often with harsh rhetoric.
During a visit there in August, Netanyahu pledged to “return south Tel Aviv to the citizens of Israel,” adding that the Africans were “not refugees but illegal infiltrators.”


Syria state TV says Israel struck bridges near border with Lebanon

Updated 6 sec ago
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Syria state TV says Israel struck bridges near border with Lebanon

  • The defense ministry said “the Israeli enemy launched an air aggression from the direction of Lebanese territory, targeting crossing points that it had previously hit” between the two countries

DAMASUS: Syrian state television reported Israeli strikes on several bridges in the Qusayr region near the Lebanese border on Monday, with the defense ministry reporting two civilians injured in the attacks.
Israel’s military has intensified its strikes on targets in Syria since its conflict with Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon escalated into full-scale war in late September after almost a year of cross-border hostilities.
“An Israeli aggression targeted the bridges of Al-Jubaniyeh, Al-Daf, Arjoun, and the Al-Nizariyeh Gate in the Qusayr area,” state television said, with official news agency SANA reporting damage in the attacks.
The defense ministry said “the Israeli enemy launched an air aggression from the direction of Lebanese territory, targeting crossing points that it had previously hit” between the two countries.
The attacks “injured two civilians and caused material losses,” it added.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor, based in Britain, said the attacks had “killed two Syrians working with Hezbollah and injured five others,” giving a preliminary toll.
Earlier, the monitor with a network of sources in Syria had said the “Israeli strikes targeted” an official land border crossing in the Qusayr area and six bridges on the Orontes River near the border with Lebanon.
Since September, Israel has bombed land crossings between Lebanon and Syria, putting them out of service. It accuses Hezbollah of using the routes, key for people fleeing the war in Lebanon, to transfer weapons from Syria.

 

 


Iraqis sentenced to prison in $2.5bn corruption case

Updated 3 min 57 sec ago
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Iraqis sentenced to prison in $2.5bn corruption case

  • A criminal court in Baghdad specializing in corruption cases issued the prison sentences ranging from three to 10 years, a statement from Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council said

BAGHDAD: An Iraqi court on Monday sentenced to prison former senior officials, a businessman and others for involvement in the theft of $2.5 billion in public funds — one of Iraq’s biggest corruption cases.
The three most high-profile individuals sentenced — businessman Nour Zuhair, as well as former prime minister Mustafa Al-Kadhemi’s cabinet director Raed Jouhi and a former adviser, Haitham Al-Juburi — are on the run and were tried in absentia.
The scandal, dubbed the “heist of the century,” has sparked widespread anger in Iraq, which is ravaged by rampant corruption, unemployment and decaying infrastructure after decades of conflict.
A criminal court in Baghdad specializing in corruption cases issued the prison sentences ranging from three to 10 years, a statement from Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council said.
Thirteen people received sentences on Monday, according to member of Parliament Mostafa Sanad.
Most of them, 10, are from Iraq’s tax authority and include its former director and deputy, he added on his Telegram channel.
Iraq revealed two years ago that at least $2.5 billion was stolen between September 2021 and August 2022 through 247 cheques that were cashed by five companies.
The money was then withdrawn in cash from the accounts of those firms.
A judicial source told AFP that some tax officials charged were in detention, without detailing how many.
Businessman Zuhair was sentenced to 10 years in prison, according to the judiciary statement.
He was arrested at Baghdad airport in October 2022 as he was trying to leave the country, but released on bail a month later after giving back more than $125 million and pledging to return the rest in instalments.
The wealthy businessman was back in the news in August after he reportedly had a car crash in Lebanon, following an interview he gave to an Iraqi news channel.
Juburi, the former prime ministerial adviser, received a three-year prison sentence. He also returned $2.6 million before disappearing, a judicial source told AFP.
Kadhemi’s cabinet director Raed Jouhi, also currently outside Iraq, was sentenced to six years in prison — alongside “a number of officials involved in the crime,” according to the judiciary’s statement.
Corruption is rampant across Iraq’s public institutions, but convictions typically target mid-level officials or minor players and rarely those at the top of the power hierarchy.
 

 


11 killed in Kurdish-led attacks in north Syria: war monitor

Updated 8 min 42 sec ago
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11 killed in Kurdish-led attacks in north Syria: war monitor

  • Seven Turkiye-backed militants were also killed in the attack and in an operation by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces that control swathes of northeast Syria.

BEIRUT: The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said Monday 11 people including civilians were killed in attacks by a Kurdish-led force on positions of Turkiye-backed militants in north Syria.
“A woman, her two children and a man were killed... in the bombing of a military position... used by Ankara-backed factions for human smuggling operations to Turkiye,” the Britain-based monitor said.
It said seven Turkiye-backed militants were also killed in that incident and in an operation by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that control swathes of northeast Syria.
SDF special forces infiltrated a Turkiye-backed group’s military position and killed three militants, said the monitor with a network of sources inside Syria.
The SDF also booby-trapped a military position as they withdrew, in an attack that killed another four pro-Turkiye militants but also four civilians including a woman and her two children, the Observatory said.
On Sunday, 15 Ankara-backed Syrian militants were killed after the SDF infiltrated their territory, the monitor reported earlier.
The SDF is a US-backed force that spearheaded the fighting against the Daesh group in its last Syria strongholds before its territorial defeat in 2019.
It is dominated by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), viewed by Ankara as an offshoot of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Turkish troops and allied armed factions control swathes of northern Syria following successive cross-border offensives since 2016, most of them targeting the SDF.


Sudan women facing ‘epidemic of sexual violence’: UN

Updated 55 min 20 sec ago
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Sudan women facing ‘epidemic of sexual violence’: UN

PORT SUDAN: The United Nations humanitarian chief raised the alarm on Monday over an “epidemic of sexual violence” against women in war-torn Sudan, saying the world “must do better.”
“I feel ashamed that we have not been able to protect you, and I feel ashamed for my fellow men for what they have done,” Tom Fletcher, who heads the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said on his first visit to Port Sudan.
The Red Sea city has become Sudan’s de facto capital since April 2023, when Khartoum was engulfed by war between the regular military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
The war has claimed tens of thousands of lives, displaced more than 11 million people and created what the UN says is the worst humanitarian crisis in recent memory.
Nearly 26 million people — around half the population — face the threat of mass starvation, as both warring sides have been accused of using hunger as a weapon of war.
During his visit, Fletcher met army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and discussed efforts to “increase the delivery of aid across borders and across conflict lines.”
Aid workers and humanitarian agencies say Burhan’s army-aligned government has enforced severe bureaucratic hurdles to their work.
At an event in a Port Sudan school to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Fletcher said the world “must do better” by the women of Sudan, who have been exposed to systematic sexual violence.
The UN’s independent international fact-finding mission for Sudan last month documented escalating sexual violence, including “rape, sexual exploitation and abduction for sexual purposes as well as allegations of enforced marriages and human trafficking.”
“The sheer scale of sexual violence we have documented in Sudan is staggering,” said Mohamed Chande Othman, chair of the fact-finding mission.
“The situation faced by vulnerable civilians, in particular women and girls of all ages, is deeply alarming and needs urgent address,” he added.


EU offers Morocco €200 million in quake reconstruction aid

Updated 25 November 2024
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EU offers Morocco €200 million in quake reconstruction aid

  • Relations between Morocco and the EU are strained after the European Court of Justice annulled fishing and agricultural deals between the two parties over products from disputed Western Sahara

RABAT: The European Union plans to offer Morocco 200 million euros ($210 million) to help with post-earthquake reconstruction, EU commissioner for neighborhood and enlargement Oliver Varhelyi said on Monday, as the two parties navigate judicial headwinds.
The 6.8 magnitude quake, Morocco’s deadliest since 1960, struck on Sept. 8, 2023, killing more than 2,900 people and damaging vital infrastructure. Morocco said it would invest In a post-earthquake reconstruction plan that includes the upgrade of infrastructure in five years.
The EU will increase its total quake reconstruction aid to Morocco to 1 billion euros, Varhelyi told a press conference in Rabat following talks with foreign minister Nasser Bourita.
Morocco was a “reliable” partner, receiving 5.2 billion euros in EU investments over the last five years, he said.
Relations between Morocco and the EU are strained after the European Court of Justice annulled fishing and agricultural deals between the two parties over products from disputed Western Sahara.
The long-frozen conflict, dating back to 1975, pits Morocco, which considers Western Sahara its own territory, against the Algeria-backed Polisario Front independence movement, which seeks a separate state there.
Following the verdict, the European Council and the Commission said they attached “high value” to relations with Morocco.
The EU’s relationship with Morocco needs to be protected from judicial harassment, Bourita said, adding that “there will be no partnerships at the expense of Morocco’s territorial integrity.”
The challenges facing Morocco-EU relations contrast with the stronger economic and political ties Rabat has forged with Madrid and Paris, after the two former colonial powers backed a Moroccan autonomy plan for Western Sahara. ($1 = 0.9499 euros)