Saharonim Prison

The Saharonim Prison was an Israeli detention facility for African asylum seekers located in the Negev desert. It is the largest of a planned four camps with its total capacity of 8,000 inmates. Together with the Ktzi'ot prison, Sadot prison and the Nachal Raviv tent camp they detain South Sudanese, Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers who crossed the border from Egypt to Israel.

Since 2010 provisions were made to detain the immigrants in the old Ktzi'ot Prison, formally used as a detention camp for Palestinians.

On January 10, 2012 the Israeli parliament (Knesset) voted a controversial amendment bill to the 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law that made detention for up to three years possible for African immigrants, without trial. In the spring of 2012 the construction of the Saharonim Prison was started, exempt from most local and national regulations, as requested by the Israeli Defense Ministry.

The facility closed in May 2020 due to a low number of detainees, the few remaining detainees were left where transferred to Givon Prison.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.