Report: Hamas torturing 250 Eritreans in Egypt

[oberliner]

Approximately 250 Eritrean refugees have been held captive and tortured for the past month by Hamas in northern Sinai, human rights organization EveryOne reported.

The Italian-based organization sent an urgent plea to the Egyptian government last Thursday, claiming that the refugees, who were making their way to Israel to seek asylum, were captured by human traffickers.

The issue of illegal refugees infiltrating through the Egyptian border has been dominating the news in Israel in recent months, but it appears that many meet a dreadful fate even before reaching the Jewish state.

The humanitarian aid group reported that the refugees in question encountered Hamas operatives along the route, who promised to smuggle them into Israel for a payment of $2,000. Instead, they were placed in a detention facility on the outskirts of Rafah, an Egyptian town on the Gaza border, demanding their families in Eritrea pay a $10,000 ransom for their release.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4005541,00.html

[jimmie]

1. Why am I NOT surprised.

nt

[Ken Burch]

2. And they shouldn't be doing that.

But that has nothing to do with the Gaza dispute OR the I/P dispute.

The Egyptian government has the responsibility to stop Hamas from doing that, and the people they're holding hostage, who should be released of course, are Eritreans, not Israelis.

Besides, it isn't possible to wipe out Hamas without such a wipeout leading to Hamas being replaced by a MORE extreme group. Hamas, after, is the more extreme result of the Israeli government's pointless fixation with trying to delegitimize Fatah and before it the PLO. If the PLO had simply been accepted as the negotiating voice of Palestinians from the get-go, Hamas wouldn't exist and the I/P dispute would likely have been resolved with a legitimate two-state solution.