Israel will naturalize scores of Darfur refugees.

Israel intends to grant citizenship to several hundred refugees from Darfur who are currently in the country, Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit said yesterday.

Estimates put the number of asylum seekers and refugees in Israel today at more than 2,000, many of them from Sudan. The UN estimates that since 2003, when the fighting began in the Darfur region of western Sudan, more than 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million people have been uprooted from their homes.

Israel will grant citizenship to some of the hundreds of Muslim refugees from Sudan's violence-ridden Darfur region who have already arrived, Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit said Wednesday.

On August 2, 2007, in repeated attempts to escape the conflict, refugees crossed the border into Egypt and then attempted to cross into Israel where Egyptian soldiers then killed the four Sudanese trying to cross border.

Israel Defense Force soldiers described the incident. "What happened there yesterday was a lynch. These are not men, they're animals. They killed the refugees without even using firearms", the soldier said. "We just heard screams of pain and the sounds of beatings, and then the screams stopped."

The Darfur conflict is a crisis in the Darfur region of western Sudan. Unlike the Second Sudanese Civil War, which was fought between the primarily Muslim north and Christian and Animist south, the current lines of conflict are seen to be ethnic and tribal, rather than religious. One side of the armed conflict is composed mainly of the Sudanese military and the Janjaweed, a militia group recruited mostly from the Arab Baggara tribes of the northern Rizeigat, camel-herding nomads. The other side comprises a variety of rebel groups, notably the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement, recruited primarily from the land-tilling Fur, Zaghawa, and Massaleit ethnic groups. The Sudanese government, while publicly denying that it supports the Janjaweed, has provided money and assistance to the militia and has participated in joint attacks targeting the tribes from which the rebels draw support. The conflict began in February 2003.

"The various tribes that have been the object of attacks and killings (chiefly the Fur, Massalit and Zaghawa tribes) do not appear to make up ethnic groups distinct from the ethnic group to which persons or militias that attack them belong. They speak the same language (Arabic) and embrace the same religion (Islam)" (p. 129).

Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to the United Nations Secretary-General (PDF), United Nations, 25 January 2005,