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Israel orders Rafah evacuation after night of intense bombardment

Israel orders Rafah evacuation after night of intense bombardment

NewsFeed Palestinian families have begun leaving eastern Rafah after the Israeli military ordered its evacuation, saying it will use ‘extreme force’ there. World leaders have repeatedly warned against a military offensive where more than 1.5 million displaced people are sheltering. Published On 6 May 20246 May 2024 Adblock test (Why?)

Tunis police raid sees refugees abandoned near the border with Algeria

Tunis police raid sees refugees abandoned near the border with Algeria

Tunis, Tunisia – Teams of refuse workers are busy in the deserted alleyway outside the International Organization for Migration (IOM) offices in Tunis. A nearby park stands empty. In both, large piles of refuse are the only evidence of the hundreds of sub-Saharan African refugees and migrants who sheltered here until recently. In the early hours of Friday morning, police swept into both camps, plus a protest site outside the offices of the UNHCR a few miles distant, clearing them of the shelters erected there and bundling the men, women and children onto municipal buses to the Algerian border. The Refugees in Libya organisation claims they were taken off the buses near the border town of Jendouba – whose governorate borders Algeria – where they were left without food or water to fend for themselves. The raids in Tunis are the latest example of an increasingly hostile environment taking hold in Tunisia. One where irregular sub-Saharan African arrivals, their numbers swelling by the day, find themselves attacked by both security services and politicians, forced to shelter in open fields while increasingly vulnerable to kidnapping and ransom. Who they are There are currently tens of thousands of irregular sub-Saharan African arrivals sheltering in Tunisia, nearly all hoping to continue their months-long journeys on to Europe. 🚨Ongoing mass desert  dumping by the Tunisian authorities.  Yesterday  at approximately 3 am, multiple police forces including special riot control and anti-terrorism units dismantled the protest camp outside the UNHCR office in the Lac zone of Tunis. Hundreds of refugees and… pic.twitter.com/5uaYxDmR75 — Refugees In Libya (@RefugeesinLibya) May 3, 2024 Total numbers are impossible to confirm. However, the IOM estimates that about 15,000 may be living in the fields near the coastal city of Sfax after police ejected them from the centre in September. Some have returned to the outskirts of the city, squatting in the working-class districts close to the rail tracks. More shelter in the fields near Zarzis, close to the Libyan border, clustering around the UNHCR office in hopes of securing refugee accreditation and a degree of protection in a country that offers none. Some 550 were estimated to have been living rough in Tunis at the time of Friday’s police raid. Outside the offices of the IOM, many families had sheltered in structures of timber and tarpaulin. Among them were a large number of children and newborn babies, including Freedom, a four-month-old boy born in Tunisia to a Nigerian mother, Gift. “I named him that because I need freedom,” she had told Al Jazeera, “I need to know freedom. There is no freedom for us,” she says. Gift had entered the country last summer through Libya, where a militia patrolling the desert had taken her prisoner, holding her for seven months before her family in Nigeria could raise her ransom. Gift and Freedom’s location is currently unknown. Cleanup crews clearing the alleyway by the IOM office in Tunis on May 3, 2024 [Al Jazeera] Unwanted Conditions in the fields near Sfax are dire, 37-year-old Richard from Ghana said. Violent police raids and surveillance have grown more frequent and disease has gradually taken hold in a community deprived of medical care. The fear of arrest and deportation to the desert borders with Libya and Algeria is ubiquitous. “Conditions there are bad. Very, very bad,” Richard said. He had returned from Sfax to the fragile security of the IOM camp in Tunis a week earlier. “I am sick, you can see. My body hurts,” he said. “I have to go to hospital but they give you no assistance. In Sfax, it is very difficult.” He gestured to his friend Solomon, 36, who was coughing: “My brother here is really sick. He’s been coughing for some time,” he said. “I started to cough three days ago. All my body hurts. Lots of people at the camp had the same symptoms,” Solomon said. On top of the spread of disease is the ongoing threat from the police. Camps around Sfax where the undocumented shelter offer no protection from police surveillance, which has taken to the skies recently. “I saw the drones,” Solomon says. “I was at Kilometre 31. They were going up and down,” he says, waving his hand above his head. Tear gas canisters from Al Amrah, near Sfax, Tunisia 23-25 April 2024 [Courtesy of Richard] Richard joins in, he had been at Kilometre 34, names given to the informal camps based on their distance from Sfax centre. He describes a raid last month where the refugees were able to film the police burning tents and firing tear gas. “The police came and burned the tents,” Richard explains, showing the video of the raid on his phone.  “I don’t know why they did it,” he says. But this is just one of what have become commonplace raids for those living in the fields around Sfax, shut off from the world by a police force that seeks to block access from NGOs and prying journalists. Both Richard and Solomon subsequently told Al Jazeera that they were away from the Tunis camps at the time of the police raid. Kidnapped With much of the sub-Saharan African refugee community existing in an official vacuum, a trade in kidnapping has been growing since at least the end of last year. In Tunis, huddled on a broken sofa that, like the shelters surrounding it, was subsequently swept up in the raid, three Sierra Leoneans spoke of having been held and tortured on arriving in Sfax from Algeria. Tunisia Is Not Safe. Please We Want To Leave Before🇹🇳Election. Many Woman,Breastfeeding Mum And Kids Have To Sleep Out Until Their Parents,Guidance Able To Fix Their Plastic Houses. European Migration Policy Keep Enslaves,Kill,Rape,Exploitation In Our Own Continent.🇹🇳🇪🇺Are Killer https://t.co/S9ULWrwguu pic.twitter.com/mMZCL4Sfqp — Josephus Thomas (@JosephusT001) April 6, 2024 They were held prisoner by an unknown number of Francophones, their guess was Cameroonians, after being “sold” to them by the Tunisian smugglers they had already paid 600 euros ($644) to. “They beat us with