The Israeli government has issued a notice for thousands of African migrants to leave the country or face imprisonment.<\/p>\n
The migrants will be given up to $3,500 (\u00a32,600) for leaving within the next 90 days.<\/p>\n
They will be given the option of going to their home country or third countries.<\/p>\n
If they do not leave, the Israeli authorities have threatened that they will start jailing them from April.<\/p>\n
The UN refugee agency said the controversial plan violated international and Israeli laws.<\/p>\n
The Israeli government says their return will be humane and “voluntary”.<\/p>\n
The order exempts children, elderly people, and victims of slavery and human trafficking.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority told the BBC there were currently 38,000 “infiltrators” in Israel, of whom just 1,420 were being held in detention facilities.<\/p>\n
Israel uses the term “infiltrators” to describe people who did not enter the country through an official border crossing.<\/p>\n
Many of the migrants – who are mostly from Eritrea and Sudan – say they came to Israel to seek asylum after fleeing persecution and conflict, but the authorities regard them as economic migrants.<\/p>\n
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that an unchecked influx of African migrants could threaten Israel’s Jewish character.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Israeli government has issued a notice for thousands of African migrants to leave the country or face imprisonment. The migrants will be given up to $3,500 (\u00a32,600) for leaving within the next 90 days. They will be given the option of going to their home country or third countries. If they do not leave, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":388187,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[15822,3014,15823],"class_list":["post-388186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international","tag-african-migrants","tag-israel","tag-leave-or-face-imprisonment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=388186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/388187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=388186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=388186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=388186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}