Abdel-Rahman Khaled, who comes from the Darfur region, like thousands of Sudanese refugees in Israel, feels that the specter of expulsion is haunting them, in light of talk of normalizing relations between Tel Aviv and Khartoum.

Abd al-Rahman, who entered the country as an infiltrator through Sinai, became the thirtieth, thinking that he is subject to deportation at any moment, as he says, so he strives to keep out of sight after he and his colleagues were subjected to prosecution in their workplaces in Arab towns and with 48 Palestinians.

Amid the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's joy of normalization with Sudan, Abdel Rahman and the Sudanese refugees in Tel Aviv live fears of expulsion and deportation to their hometowns in the Darfur region, which has witnessed a civil war since 2003.

Abdel-Rahman clarified - in a telephone conversation with Al Jazeera Net - from his whereabouts in Tel Aviv that it is not ruled out that they would immediately initiate the gathering of Sudanese refugees in preparation for their forcible deportation without even ruling on asylum applications.

Sudanese refugees live amid marginalization, without residency, without any services, and are subjected to exploitation and extortion in the workplace without any rights, except for those who have acclimatized to Arab towns, and obtained job opportunities and were embraced by 48 Palestinians, according to Abd al-Rahman.

Sudanese refugees in an Arab town in the Palestinian interior, waiting for their employer to go to work (Al-Jazeera Net)

Concerns and Concerns:


6285 refugees from Sudan reside in Tel Aviv, according to Population and Immigration Authority data, and the data show that the Sudanese constitute about 20% of the 32,000 African refugees, and most of the African refugees residing in Israel are from Eritrea, Sudan, and other African countries.

The data shows that since the beginning of 2020, 663 refugees left Israel voluntarily, 68 of them from Sudan, and this number is expected to increase after the normalization agreement between Israel and Sudan.

Maariv newspaper says, "Thousands of Sudanese refugees will return to their country with the consent of the two countries, with guarantees for their safety."

Monem Haroun, one of the leaders of the Sudanese asylum-seekers community in Israel, expressed his concern that relations between Israel and Sudan "could give international legitimacy to the generals who are now ruling the country, who are not welcome by the Sudanese people, because they have committed crimes against humanity."

Haroun explained - in a phone call with Al Jazeera Net - that another concern looms over the Sudanese refugees, which is that Israel aims, through normalization, to return them to their country despite the deteriorating security situation in the areas from which they came, and that the conditions that turned them into refugees are still in place. It has worsened recently.

African and Sudanese refugees are accustomed to Rabat in Al-Aqsa, especially during Ramadan and the Eid al-Fitr and Eid prayers (Al-Jazeera Net)

Normalization, displacement,


and amid scenes of fears of expulsion and forced displacement of Sudanese refugees, the Israeli government hinted that normalization with Khartoum would shorten the time and costs of flying to Brazil, and there is another declared official interest, which is that Sudan was an arena for Iran's activity and armed organizations such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, and a route to smuggling Weapons to the Islamic Resistance Movement "Hamas".


However, it seems clear that the main interest of the Israeli government is to implement the deportation of 6,285 Sudanese refugees who fled under accusations of government forces and the Janjaweed militia of committing genocide since 2003 in the Darfur region.

The Israeli authorities have always been proud of their success in preventing "one million infiltrators from Sinai from entering the country," despite the fact that only 64,000 people entered Israel even before the security fence was built between 2006 and 2012, meaning that millions of "infiltrators" did not come to Israel, They never planned to come to the land of "honey and milk", and most of them were kidnapped and trafficked, and when their families took them back and paid for them the ransom to the human trafficking gangs in Sinai, they were dumped at the border with Israel.

Netanyahu also boasts about the deportation of about 20 thousand Sudanese refugees, and on the eve of his visit to Uganda at the beginning of the year, Netanyahu said during the Likud Center conference, "We have already eliminated a third of those who still enter, and we will remove the remaining two-thirds, and you will hear news soon."

Immediately after that, he met with the head of the Transitional Sovereignty Council in Sudan, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.

Asylum, residence and in


response to the scheme of forcible deportation, about 4,500 Sudanese refugees have applied for political asylum, and have been waiting for a decision for more than a decade.

The Netanyahu government tried by all means to avoid this. At first it prevented refugees from seeking asylum, contrary to the international agreement to which Israel had signed, then there was an endless delay in bringing the applications to discussion.

Days before the official announcement of the normalization of relations between Tel Aviv and Khartoum, the Israeli Supreme Court approved the Ministry of the Interior to reject the application for granting asylum to refugees from the Darfur region for a period of 3 months, which strengthens the trend towards deporting them to Sudan under the normalization of relations.

Demonstration by African and Sudanese refugees in Tel Aviv (Al Jazeera Net)

This postponement came in the interest of the Israeli Interior Ministry after it provided information about "secret developments" that were widely promoted regarding the possibility of concluding a "peace agreement" with Sudan. According to the Israeli Public Prosecution, these developments may have repercussions on the outcome of the petition, and accordingly the Supreme Court allowed the Public Prosecution to present Another update on the topic in January.

Supreme Court President Esther Hayut and Judges Yael Wilner and George Kara face again accusations of allowing the state to evade many articles of the Refugee Convention, and this contradicts a previous court decision in March 2019, when it demanded a justification for preventing the granting of "temporary residence" to African refugees.

However, normalization does not solve all obstacles to the deportation of Sudanese refugees in Israel, as the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention stipulates that no person may be deported to a place where his life or freedom is at risk, and although governance in the country has changed recently, stability has not To be achieved in Sudan, and the country has not been declared safe, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.