Published: 27 November 2017
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Torture, death at sea: what awaits asylum seekers Israel deports (Haaretz)
LIOR BIRGER “Increased removal” is how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at the weekly cabinet meeting Sunday, called the new policy in which asylum seekers will be required to choose between leaving Israel for Rwanda and being jailed indefinitely.
Until now, deportations of asylum seekers from Israel were conducted within the framework of “voluntary” departure. Now the government wants to deport them involuntarily through an agreement recently signed with Rwanda, a country that Israel repeatedly calls “safe” and “neutral.”
But dozens of statements we gathered in Europe over the past few months from people who “voluntarily” left Israel for Rwanda and Uganda in recent years strengthen what previous reports on the matter found: they face torture or death.
The Holot detention facility was a moral failure from day one (972)
Holot was meant to hide the fact that the State of Israel sees African asylum seekers as enemies, as a demographic threat, as a foreign body to be expelled at any cost. It is expected to close in the coming months
Migrants jump into the water from a crowded wooden boat as they are helped a rescue operation at the Mediterranean Sea near Libya in August 2016 (AP)
