Israel SCRAPS UN deal to relocate thousands of African asylum seekers across West
ISRAELI Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decided to cancel an agreement with the United Nations refugee agency to relocate thousands of African migrants, bowing to right-wing pressure to scrap the deal.
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Hours after announcing on Monday the arrangement, which also would have given thousands of other migrants the right to stay in Israel, Mr Netanyahu posted on his Facebook page that he was putting its implementation on hold until a further review.
He then declared the agreement dead at a meeting today with representatives of residents of south Tel Aviv, a poor area that has attracted the largest migrant community and where many of its inhabitants want the Africans out.
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A statement from the prime minister's office quoted Mr Netanyahu as saying at the session: “I have listened carefully to the many comments on the agreement. As a result, and after I again weighed the advantages and disadvantages, I decided to cancel the deal.”
The fate of about 37,000 Africans in Israel has posed a moral dilemma for a state founded as a haven for Jewish people fleeing persecution.
EPA
We will continue to act with determination to explore all of the options at our disposal to remove the infiltrators
The right-wing government has been under pressure from its nationalist voter base to expel the migrants.
It had been moving ahead with plans to deport many of them to Rwanda when Israel's Supreme Court intervened and froze such deportations in March.
According to the agreement with the UN refugee agency which Mr Netanyahu outlined on Monday, about 16,250 African migrants, most of them from Eritrea and Sudan, would have been relocated to Western nations.
Mr Netanyahu said in the statement on Tuesday: ”Despite legal restraints and international difficulties that are piling up, we will continue to act with determination to explore all of the options at our disposal to remove the infiltrators.”