Large-scale forces from Israeli police and the Interior Ministry engaged in violent clashes with hundreds of Asylum-seekers on Sunday who defied order to return to the Holot detention center. The protesters built a tent near the Egyptian border, and refused authorities’ demands that they board a bus to transport them from the premises. Police then began to forcibly remove them from the premises, resulting in hundreds of arrests. They were thereafter transported to Saharonim prison.

According to activists who spoke at a press conference in Tel Aviv on Sunday, Eritrean and Sudanese migrants were willing to face the possibility of violence in Sinai and deportation to possible persecution in their homelands rather than remain in Israel’s desert detention facility.

In Tel Aviv, Eritrean Philemon Rezene said: “The government of Israel left them with only two choices: to be imprisoned in their homeland or in Israel. These choices are the same.” He added: “If [the government] doesn’t agree, they should allow the migrants to be turned over to the international community. They have suffered here and they’ll suffer there.”

Longtime Eritrean activist Kidane Isaac said life for migrants in Israel has become “like one large prison” and that “asylum seekers community in Israel have had the experience of being prisoners in this country as a whole, because we don’t have rights, and we are punished collectively, and our voices are not heard.”

Source: Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel