TEL AVIV, 30 September 2009 (IRIN): Rights groups such as Amnesty International have called on the Egyptian authorities to “urgently rein in their border security forces” after seven African asylum-seekers were killed in September trying to cross into Israel on foot, but some Israeli NGOs and soldiers say the death toll at the border is far higher.
– I strongly believe there are hundreds of unreported dead and wounded [at the border], Sigal Rosen, public activities coordinator at the NGO Moked, a hotline for migrants, told IRIN.
– We’ve interviewed hundreds of asylum-seekers and nearly all told us that some people in their group were shot and left behind while attempting to cross the border. Furthermore, we have evidence from IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] soldiers revealing that the death toll on the Egyptian side is much higher than reported. The graveyard for asylum-seekers shot on the [Israeli side] of the border in Kibbutz Hatzor already holds 25 graves [since mid-2007]. Many of the asylum-seekers tell us that [other] bodies are left in the dessert.
The Sons of Darfur, an NGO assisting asylum-seekers in Israel, concurred that many more were being killed than reports suggested.
Incidents in September
The most recent reported incident at the Egypt-Israel border was on 20 September when a Sudanese asylum-seeker was shot dead, according to the Egyptian police.
This incident followed one on 16 September when two Eritrean asylum-seekers were shot dead, and at the start of the month when four African asylum-seekers were killed.
According to Amnesty International, their killings brought the number of Africans shot dead at the border to 14 so far in 2009, while 28 were killed in 2008
Some 24.000 asylum-seekers have illegally entered Israel through its southern border in the past five years, according to estimates by Israel’s Ministry of Interior.
Estimates of the number of asylum-seekers in Israel today vary from 17.000, as registered by the UN Refugee Agency, to some 24.000, as claimed by the Israeli immigration authority.
According to sources in the IDF and immigration authority, asylum-seekers are crossing the Egypt-Israel border at a rate of 400-600 every month, despite the grave dangers.
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