“When our troops see individuals at night, they ask them to stop throughloudspeakers. If the individuals fail to do that, we fire in the air.After that, they are forced to shoot at the individuals.”
Eritrean Yirgalam Beyene’s tired eyes swell with tears as sherecalls the day her son was killed. One night in April 2008, Beyenefound herself lying in the cold sand of Egypt’svast Sinai desert, nervously eyeing the barbed-wired fence thatseparated her from her destination: Israel. Only a few hundred metersaway, the fence along the border was low enough to jump. But Beyene,who was there with her three children and a group of some 20 asylumseekers from Eritrea, Darfur and southern Sudan, knew that before they reached the other side they would have to get past the armed Egyptian border police.
As the group approached the fence, recalls Beyene, she heard warning shouts from Egyptian border guardsand then shots. Terrified, she kept running and jumped over the fencewith her youngest son, 7-year-old Mulugeta. As she turned around, shesaw that 21-year-old Iskender and his 3-year-old sibling Rosa, whom hewas carrying on his back, had been shot.”I shouted for Iskender to jump over the fence and he did. That’s whenthe Israeli soldiers took them to hospital. After four days, my sondied,” Beyene says. Rosa, who reveals a bullet-wound scar the size of alarge coin on her right leg, looks on mutely. Her mother says she hashardly spoken since that night 18 months ago