20 August, 2007
The dress of an African girl hangs on a barbed-wire fence after she has crossed the Israeli-Egyptian border with her family. A growing number of migrants, many from the conflict-torn Darfur area of Sudan, passed illegally into Israel in 2007. Many had already lived for some years in Egypt. Israel argued that such people were not refugees but economic migrants, and reserved the right to refuse entry to asylum-seekers from what it regarded as enemy countries, such as Sudan. In July, the Egyptian president had promised to step up action against border infiltrators and the Egyptian military adopted a more aggressive stance towards them.
