Some 1,200 illegal migrants who will be released from a Negev detention facility will not be allowed to settle in Tel Aviv or Eilat.
Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled that illegal migrants can only be held in a Negev detention facility for 12 months while a law is revised.\n
One hour before the 19th Israeli Knesset, or parliament, dissolved forever on Dec. 8, its members made a last-ditch effort to save Holot, the “open” desert prison they created one year prior to detain undocumented Eritrean and Sudanese immigrants.
A historic 216-page ruling handed down on Sept. 22 by the Supreme Court of Israel marks a breakthrough for the young country’s muddled migrant and refugee law.
The Supreme Court of Israel ruled this evening to close a desert prison called Holot, a facility that Israeli lawmakers created last December to indefinitely hold African asylum seekers who had \”infiltrated\” the border.
For two years, Israel’s government has been encouraging its population of African migrants to leave the country.
“When the conflict started in the Darfur region and we came to Israel, all the people knew why,” said Yeman Adam, a 30-year-old Sudanese asylum seeker who fled to Israel in 2008.
A compound of one-story buildings deep in the southern Israeli desert is now home to some 400 African migrants who face the prospect of being held in custody indefinitely.
After three days of walking in the cold and snow, many of them on hunger strike, 150 African asylum seekers were forced onto buses and taken back to the new detention center in the Negev desert.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.