Israel cancels plan to deport African migrants

TEL AVIV. - Israel announced yesterday it had reached a deal with the UN refugee agency to cancel a controversial plan to deport African migrants and replace it with a new one that will see thousands sent to Western countries.

The deal means thousands more of the primarily Sudanese and Eritrean migrants will remain in Israel at least temporarily.

It also ends the possibility that many would be forcibly deported to an unnamed African country, widely believed to be Uganda or Rwanda.

A minimum of 16 250 migrants will be resettled in Western nations including Canada, Germany and Italy under the agreement announced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“The agreement stipulates that for each migrant who leaves the country, we commit to give temporary residence status to another,” Netanyahu said in a televised address after Israel announced the deal.

Netanyahu in January announced the implementation of a programme to remove migrants who entered illegally, giving them a choice between leaving voluntarily or facing indefinite imprisonment with eventual forced expulsion.

According to interior ministry figures, there are currently some 42 000 African migrants in Israel, half of them children, women or men with families, who were not facing immediate deportation.

They had initially been given a deadline of April 1, but Israel’s supreme court suspended the plan on March 15 while it continued to examine it.

Israel’s statement announcing the new plan yesterday said there was no longer a need to send migrants to unnamed third countries.

Netanyahu said in his remarks yesterday that he had to abandon the earlier plan because the option of sending them to a third country “no longer exists”.

Rwanda and Uganda have said they would not accept those deported against their will.

The earlier plans had drawn sharp criticism from the United Nations refugee agency as well as from some Israelis and rights activists.

The migrants’ presence in Israel has become a political issue, with Netanyahu referring to them as “not refugees but illegal infiltrators”.

Religious and conservative politicians have portrayed the presence of Muslim and Christian Africans as a threat to Israel’s Jewish character.