Israel launches African migrant deportation drive

Israel launched a high-profile deportation drive against African migrants on Sunday with an airlift of South Sudanese whose government said they would be welcomed back as economic assets.   

The planned weekly repatriation flights from Tel Aviv to Juba have been played up by the Israeli government amid uncertainty as to how it might deal with much greater migrant influxes from Sudan, a hostile country, and war-ravaged Eritrea.   

"Today the government commences the mission of returning the illegal work infiltrators to their countries of origin," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet, using a term Israel applies to the vast majority of the some 60,000 Africans who walked in over its porous border with Egypt in recent years.   

Hastened by street protests, some violent, against the migrants in a Jewish state that sees them as a threat to public order and demographics, the government seized on the South Sudanese, whose de facto refugee status was rescinded by an Israeli court this month given their fledgling country's relative stability.  

The decision was supported by Juba. Formally independent from Sudan since last July, the African country received clandestine Israeli help for decades prior and counts on wider investment in its struggling agriculture and oil sectors.   

REUTERS