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One of the victims, who was not identified, told Rai News24 from his hospital bed that he feared being killed as the attacker fired. He lifted a sheet to show his leg, wrapped in bandages.

The shootings rattled a nation where such episodes are rare. According to a 2007 study, about 12.9 percent of Italian households have guns.

The rampage came days after the brutal killing of an 18-year-old woman, Pamela Mastropietro, in Macerata, a crime that shook the city of 42,000 people east of Rome.

Ms. Mastropietro's body was found in pieces in two suitcases on Wednesday, and the police arrested a Nigerian man, Innocent Oseghale, the next day. He stands accused of killing her and dismembering her corpse. The arrest quickly became a focal point for anti-migrant sentiments.

On Saturday, officials told reporters there was no indication that Mr. Traini and Ms. Mastropietro had known each other. But Mr. Minniti, the interior minister, said Saturday's shooting "strongly recalls a raid of retaliation - a random, armed retaliation."

Macerata's mayor, Romano Carancini, said the connection "may not have been direct, but could be ascribable to the campaign of racial hatred that began after Pamela's death."

"Nothing so serious had ever happened in Macerata," at least not in living memory, Mr. Carancini said in a telephone interview about Ms. Mastropietro's killing. "Pamela's death upset and struck a chord in the city," he said, adding that the racial hatred that followed "filled people with fear."

Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni told reporters after the shooting that the government would deal "severely" with anyone trying to stoke racist actions. "Hatred and violence won't be able to divide us," he said.

There are just over five million foreigners residing legally in Italy, about 8.3 percent of the population of 60 million. Of these, 3.7 million are from outside the European Union.

Immigration is a hotly contested issue in Italy with national elections a little more than a month away. Far-right leaders have tried to capitalize on national unease about the unregulated waves of migrants who have made the perilous crossing of the Mediterranean in recent years.

Last year, 119,000 migrants arrived by sea. Many others have died during the attempt; at least 90 may have drowned on Friday.

Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League political party, which has historically run on an anti-immigrant platform, said on Twitter after Ms. Mastropietro's killing that the suspect "was not running from war; he brought war to Italy."

"The left has blood on its hands. Expulsions, expulsions, controls and more expulsions," he wrote.

Italian media reports said that the suspect in the shootings on Saturday had been a League candidate in municipal elections last year in the nearby town of Corridonia. He was not elected.

On Saturday afternoon, a sit-in organized in support of Ms. Mastropietro's family by associations that work with migrants and members of the city's Nigerian community was canceled after the shootings.

"Now we are afraid," Sammy Kunoun, an organizer, told ANSA.

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murders  attempted murders and homicides

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'Racial Hatred' Cited After African Immigrants Are Shot in Italy

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One of the victims, who was not identified, told Rai News24 from his hospital bed that he feared being killed as the attacker fired. He lifted a sheet to show his leg, wrapped in bandages. The shootings rattled a nation where such episodes are rare.

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https://www.pambazuka.org/human-security/plight-african-refugees-israel

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http://hotline.org.il/en/i-believed-israel-that-i-will-find-shelter-in-uganda/

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https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/19/europe/france-libya-slavery-niger-intl/index.html

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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34131911

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Maybe the lack of international attention isn't strange: "Yet Another Country Cruelly Screws Over Refugees" has become such a commonplace headline that most people probably don't even bother to click on it anymore. But the current situation in Israel is worth our attention for a number of reasons. First, Israel is an instructive example of how states can devise means of shirking not only their larger moral responsibilities towards refugees, but even the modicum of legal responsibility they explicitly agreed to when they signed the Refugee Convention. Second, Israel's present situation shows that a government barely even needs to pretend that there are Important Economic Reasons for wanting to deport refugees, if no one on the political scene actually gives a damn. Third, Israel demonstrates that a nation or population with an ancestral history of persecution does not, by this fact alone, wind up having any special sympathy for the persecuted, which tells us something depressing about the intergenerational durability of history's lessons.

This is the culmination of a long and elaborate effort by the Israeli government to Have It Both Ways on refugee protection. They don't want to publicly and unambiguously derelict their duty under international law to protect refugees. They also have no intention of offering long-term protection, to say nothing of permanent status or citizenship, to 40,000 Africans. Israel's strategy so far has been to refuse to adjudicate whether the migrants are refugees or not, to make migrants' lives within Israel as miserable and alienated as possible, and, finally, to shunt off responsibility for them onto poorer countries that are eager for funds and diplomatic consideration.

Let's take a look at Prong 1 of this strategy, refusing to adjudicate whether migrants are refugees or not. Based on well-documented conditions in the countries they've fled, there's a high probability that many of these Eritrean and Sudanese migrants meet the legal definition of a "refugee," which means that Israel has certain legal obligations towards them once they enter Israel's territory. Israel was the tenth signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention (the international agreement that formally set down what a refugee is and what rights they're entitled to) and is often described as having been an especially active party in the drafting process, although some historians have disputed this. The Convention was written in the aftermath of World War II, in response to the need to protect post-war European refugees, as well as a collective recognition by world powers that they had failed to intervene appropriately on behalf of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. For example, at the 1938 Evian Conference , European delegations protested anti-Semitic laws and state violence against Jews, but failed to arrive at any constructive program for combating these evils, due to countries' unwillingness to alter their immigration laws to offer affirmative protection for Jewish refugees. The United States, in particular, famously turned away the , a ship filled with Jewish refugees, in 1939. The Refugee Convention was written in direct response to the moral failures of Allied powers during the war, and sought to ensure that, during future such crises, refugees would be legally entitled to protections in signatory countries. Without the incredible horror of the Holocaust in immediate and vivid memory, it seems unlikely that world powers would have been able to come to a consensus on refugee protection, given their previous inability to do so in 1938.

The Convention's definition of a "refugee" was very specific. A person wasn't considered a "refugee" simply because he was fleeing violence and conflict, or even because his life was in immediate danger: a refugee was, specifically, someone who had been subjected to persecution based on "race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion." Thus, the persecution of Jewish people during World War II was both the galvanizing event that made the Refugee Convention possible, and also shaped the way the word "refugee" was defined by the drafters of the Convention. (This narrow definition of a "refugee" has subsequently turned out to be infuriatingly under-inclusive in many real-life displacement situations: a lot of migrants fleeing very serious dangers end up not qualifying as refugees because the people trying to murder them haven't been courteous enough to identify any "protected grounds" for wanting them dead.) The 1951 Convention imposes certain minimal obligations on contracting states not to discriminate against refugees who are in their territory, not to punish them for seeking protection, and not to force them to return to the states they've fled. Recognized refugees are also entitled, among other things, to equal treatment with other non-nationals within the country.
We never have forgotten the boat with 900 Jews, having left Germany in the last weeks before the Second World War... traveling from harbor to harbor, from country to country, crying out for refuge. They were refused... We have never forgotten the lot of our people, persecuted, humiliated, ultimately physically destroyed. And therefore, it was natural that my first act as Prime Minister was to give those people a haven in the land of Israel.
This was a nice gesture, but it failed to become a long-term state policy. Israel has since become cautious about recognizing refugees. Of course, "I don't want any more non-Jews living and reproducing in my country" isn't a legally acceptable reason to deny applications for refugee status under the Convention. But the trouble with international law is that typically there's no way to make states stick to their own agreements other than by simply saying "Hey! in an increasingly indignant voice. States like the U.S. and Israel usually don't consistently abide by international agreements unless they're subsequently implemented in domestic law. That's what the U.S. did in 1980, for example, when it passed the United States Refugee Act: this was a national law that established an actual procedure for adjudicating the claims of self-described refugees who showed up in the U.S. to ask for protection. It's not a perfect system by any means, but it's a lot better than the discretionary free-for-all that preceded it.

Israel, on the other hand, has never passed any domestic laws setting up a uniform system for adjudicating refugees' claims, which means that the government is free to make up its own mind as to what it thinks comports with the Refugee Convention, and-as with most secretive, opaque administrative decisions-their determinations are very hard to challenge. In 2008, a "Questioning and Identification Unit" was established within the Ministry of the Interior, which was then in 2009 by the Refugee Status Determination (RSD) Unit. Since this time, the RSD has been responsible for interviewing asylum seekers and assessing their claims in light of Israel's obligations under the Refugee Convention. Not having thorough legal procedures in place to determine who's a refugee is a big problem, because the Refugee Convention only protects people who are recognized as refugees. If your government chooses not to recognize any refugees, either by delaying examining their applications or finding some reason to deny them, they can argue that they don't owe migrants any duties under the Convention.

This, essentially, has turned out to be Israel's strategy. Until recently, Sudanese and Eritrean migrants were not even permitted to make asylum requests, according to advocates. The for the few applications that have been successfully made is extremely low: as of 2015, only four Eritrean asylum applications had been granted, while 997 had been denied and 1335 left unanswered. Likewise, 40 Sudanese applications were rejected, while 2184 more were left unanswered. , three years later, we are at a grand total of eight successful Eritrean asylum-seekers and two Sudanese ones. (200 Darfurians, out of an eligible 6000, were also granted " humanitarian protection " in 2017 after it emerged that the government had for several years deliberately suppressed an internal RSD report stating that non-Arab Darfurians were fleeing genocide and clearly qualified for asylum.) Israel's extremely low asylum grant rate, at well under 1%, contrasts starkly with international averages: in EU countries, for example, Eritrean asylum applications have average acceptance rate of 86%.

To date, Israel's way of circumventing this dilemma has been to grant all Sudanese and Eritrean nationals something called " temporary protection ." This designation doesn't acknowledge that the individual is a refugee: it's a discretionary status that allows the holder to remain in the country at the government's pleasure. Failing to acknowledge these individuals formally as refugees allows Israel to avoid according them the rights they are due under the Convention, and also to continue characterizing them politically as economic migrants. But because it hasn't sent them back to their home countries to face torture or persecution, it hasn't yet violated the most literal interpretation of the lowest threshold of refugee protection.

Of course, the Israeli government still wanted all these people . It just needed a way to make them leave that didn't involve deporting them back to their home countries. This was where Prong 2 of the strategy, Making Migrants Miserable, came in. Israel has no birthright citizenship for children of non-Israeli citizens, so the children of migrants who came to Israel at a very young age, or were born in Israel, have no path to future status, even though many of them speak Hebrew as a primary language. Attempts to integrate and welcome migrant populations are subject to intense political pressures: a program in which members of the Israeli Defense Forces spent time volunteering in primary schools and daycares for refugee children in south Tel Aviv was discontinued after a local anti-migrant group complained to the Israeli Defense Minister.

"Temporarily protected" individuals technically have no right to work , and their identification cards state as much, although the Israeli government has avoided prosecuting businesses who employ individuals with protected status. Much like in the U.S., this ambiguous situation leaves migrants with little bargaining power at their workplaces, and migrant populations are consequently highly vulnerable to labor exploitation. In a shockingly brazen and petty attempt to make day-to-day life even less livable for these individuals, the government recently passed a law allowing them to confiscate 20% of all migrants' wages and place them in an escrow account, claiming that it would be returned to them as a lump sum when they chose to leave Israel. (There is no procedure for returning wages to individuals who eventually win asylum, presumably because the government has no intention of allowing this to happen.) For migrants who are already living on extremely meager wages, the loss of a fifth of their income is a huge blow that can make subsistence a practical impossibility.

As characterized by refugee advocates , the real purpose of Holot is to make a vulnerable population of migrants so miserable that they choose to "voluntarily" leave the country at some point during their twelve-month sentence. (Though the government has occasionally demurred that this is Holot's purpose, some of their blunter statements confirm the advocates' perspective pretty unequivocally : "Until I have the option of deporting them, I'll jail them in order to make their lives miserable" was Interior Minister Eli Yishai's comment about migrants in 2012.)

In addition, the Israeli government will offer migrants financial incentives to leave-usually a lump sum of around $3500-hoping that this will incentivize their "voluntary" departure. This is where Prong 3 of the strategy, shipping migrants off to third countries, historically came in. For a time, the Israeli government had implemented a policy of forcing migrants to choose between indefinite imprisonment or "voluntary" deportation to a third country. (Deportees were never officially informed of what these countries were, but investigations have since revealed them to be Uganda and Rwanda.) In August 2017, the Israeli Supreme Court held against the government's detention of migrants for more than 60 days in order to obtain their "voluntary consent" to their own deportation, but also ruled that Israel's policy of deporting migrants to third countries such as Rwanda or Uganda was lawful so long as the government took steps to ensure that the third countries were "safe." Supreme Court President Naor, in her opinion, stated that the government legally deport migrants to third countries even without their consent.

The Israeli government has since signaled that it plans to escalate the scale of removals to third countries. In November, the government that it modified its confidential agreement with an African receiving country (purportedly Rwanda) to allow it to accept migrants deported explicitly against their will, meaning that there is now probably no formal legal barrier to the deportations. Prime Minister Netanyahu has that the government is implementing a third phase of anti-infiltration measures, which he calls "increased removal," under which migrants may be deported to third countries by force, with the government paying the receiving country $5000 per migrant. Netanyahu states that this new plan "will enable us later to make the Holot facility unnecessary and to use part of the vast resources we allocate there for inspectors and increased removal... our goal is to continue removing significantly more then [ "Infiltrators' Bill" passed earlier this December, the Knesset voted to sic] what we have until now." In an increase restrictions against Israel's migrant population, including "taking into custody migrants who violated the limits of where they can live, limiting their ability to take money out of Israel and the ability of third parties to help them do so, and a three-year extension of the penalties for illegally employing them." As of January 2, 2018, the government that any migrants who have previously been at Holot or are eligible to be summoned there must leave Israel by April or face indefinite detention.

If some of these deportees are in fact legally refugees, is Israel violating international law by sending them to a third country? The Convention doesn't directly address this. Because countries have an obligation not to send people back to places where they face persecution or torture, many jurisdictions have held that refugees also can't be sent to an unsafe third country. An unsafe third country is a country where, because of political instability, or because the refugees aren't guaranteed adequate legal protections, they may be at risk of deportation back to the home country they fled. Legal hair-splitting aside, as a moral matter, it's very clear that states who have signed on an agreement to protect vulnerable people from violence will fail in their obligations if they send individuals to a third country that is not safe and will not protect them from their persecutors. If that's so, the question then becomes: are Rwanda and Uganda "safe" countries for refugees?

The answer-with reference to the 4,000 migrants whom Israel has already been sent to third countries-is a resounding "no." Though the Israeli government has been loath to release any information about its third country policies, a detailed investigation by Foreign Policy revealed that there was, in fact, no plan in place to provide for the migrants on their arrival or afford them any kind of legal status. They described the whole operation as " an opaque system of shuffling asylum-seekers from Israel, via Rwanda or Uganda, into third countries, where they are no longer anyone's responsibility":
It begins with furtive promises by Israeli authorities of asylum and work opportunities in Rwanda and Uganda. Once the Sudanese and Eritrean asylum-seekers reach Kigali or Entebbe, where Uganda's international airport is located, they describe a remarkably similar ordeal: ... Officials across several relevant ministries in Israel, Rwanda, and Uganda all issued denials or refused repeated requests for comment. But the nearly identical experiences of asylum-seekers arriving in Rwanda and Uganda, as well as their ability to bypass standard immigration channels and occasionally procure official documents from their handlers, suggests a level of government knowledge, if not direct involvement, in all three capitals. They meet someone who presents himself as a government agent at the airport, bypass immigration, move to a house or hotel that quickly feels like a prison, and are eventually pressured to leave the country. For the Eritreans, it is from Rwanda to Uganda. For Sudanese, it is from Uganda to South Sudan or Sudan. The process appears designed not just to discard unwanted refugees, but to shield the Israeli, Rwandan, and Ugandan governments from any political or legal accountability. Photo: African asylum seekers, mostly from Eritrea, take part in a protest against Israel's deportation policy in front of the Knesset in Jerusalem on January 26, 2017 - GALI TIBBON/AFP/Getty Images
Ultimately, the secrecy of Israel's current agreement with Rwanda makes it difficult to directly assess whether refugees sent there will receive any kind of protection against deportation, to say nothing of social benefits or permanent status. Given Israel's history of bad-faith policies towards their migrant population, it seems hard to trust that the new arrangements are significantly better than the old ones. Rwanda is rumored to have been promised a head per refugee, but no one has any idea how that money will be spent, or what kind of status or assistance migrants will have upon arrival. During this first phase, it appears that Israel is only contemplating deporting adult migrants without child dependants who do not have asylum applications pending. However, given the exceptionally low grant rate for asylum in Israel, applying for asylum as a means of averting deportation is likely to be a temporary solution at best. Migrants whose asylum applications have already been rejected will also not likely be able to delay their deportation through this method. The government has already that "requests for political asylum submitted after January 1, 2018 will not delay the demand for an infiltrator to leave to a third country."

It's worth pointing out-since it's often claimed that Israel comes in for more than its fair share of criticism on its human rights record-that Israel is not the only state that implements cruel, secretive policies to in a bid to pass the buck on refugee protection. One has only to look to Australia's failed plan to transfer all its asylum-seekers to Malaysia, Europe's current plan to corral migrants in Turkey, or the amount of money the U.S. gives Mexico to block refugees and other migrants from reaching our border, to realize that many countries besides Israel are eagerly seeking ways to circumvent their legal and moral responsibilities. But Israel's policies are still pretty damn bad, by international standards. And what's more, these policies are not generating much outrage within Israel. There are some excellent advocacy groups in the country, like the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants , seeking to raise awareness, but even the leadership of Israel's opposition Labor Party favors the government's proposed deportation measures.

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Israel's Treatment Of African Refugees Should Be An International Scandal | Current Affairs

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Maybe the lack of international attention isn't strange: "Yet Another Country Cruelly Screws Over Refugees" has become such a commonplace headline that most people probably don't even bother to click on it anymore. But the current situation in Israel is worth our attention for a number of reasons.

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Facts

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When Faras, 11, draws a picture of his past in Syria, he sketches an idyllic landscape with a smiling sun, a rushing river, and a green field where he and his brother once cared for sheep. Habib, 9, instead uses a black crayon to outline a helicopter dropping bombs.

Given the opportunity to draw their past, present, and future, young Syrian refugee children in a Child-Friendly Space in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon express a wide range of feelings.

That's entirely appropriate, says Bassima, the center supervisor, who is also a Syrian refugee: "We have a past that is both beautiful and ugly."

Animators, the adults who lead activities for different age groups of refugee children, don't ask them about their painful experiences and losses, she says.

"We provide a peaceful place for them to feel their freedom. It's a safe place for them to experience feelings and memories," Bassima says.

Syrian refugee children look at past, present, and future

Ahmad, a classroom animator for a group of 10- to 12-year-olds, stands in a circle of 12 boys and girls who mimic his motions as he pantomimes raising an umbrella. The Child-Friendly Space provides an "umbrella of comfort and safety over your head," he tells them.

Then the children and their animators draw, talk, and share pencils, crayons, and ideas - their observations of past, present, and future.

For the present, says Huda, another animator, "Every day there is something sad [the children hear] about relatives in Syria. They need support not to be overwhelmed by sadness."

And the future?

"The future is very important to us, the future for these children," says Huda. "If we create this peaceful place for children, we've done what we can do."

Read more below about what the Syrian refugee children created in their artwork.

Mahar's drawing is all about Syria. He drew his family home there and his brother standing beside it with arms open wide. "Mister, I had everything!" he told the translator. In the center panel, Mahar plays with his friend Shadi in Syria. In the future he wants to return there as an expert in karate. (©2016 World Vision/photo by Jon Warren)

"That's my mother, father, and brother by our beautiful house in Syria. The day is sunny, and there are butterflies," says Yasmin, 9. In the middle panel, she attends the Child-Friendly Space in Lebanon. "In the future, I want to be a teacher in Syria. That's a cabinet with books in the classroom. I'll give gifts to all the students," she says. (©2016 World Vision/photo by Jon Warren)

Faras, 11, remembers herding sheep in Syria with his brother. Now the happiest thing in his life is coming to the Child-Friendly Space so he draws the bus he rides. "In the future I want to go back to Syria and be a student. I'm not in school here," he says. (©2016 World Vision/photo by Jon Warren)

Habib, 9, recalls a helicopter dropping bombs near his home. He draws himself with a sad face near his house. "The house is okay. The bombs exploded the neighbors' house. I saw it; many were killed," he says, including members of his family. The Child-Friendly Space he attends is the subject of the middle panel. "Sometimes he doesn't want to draw, but he feels rest here," says the adult facilitator, Huda. His future picture shows him on a motorcycle on a sunny day. (©2016 World Vision/photo by Jon Warren)

Flowers, trees, sunshine, birds, and her house in Syria are Raghad's picture of the past (bottom panel). In the middle is her family's tent in Lebanon. "There are not really trees and flowers there, but I love them so I put some in," says the 11-year-old. In the future she wants to teach English in Syria. "The children ride the bus to school, and the walls of the school protect them." (©2016 World Vision/photo by Jon Warren)

Mayass, 11, pictures herself playing with her toys in Syria when she was younger. "What happened? It was all destroyed. There's nothing here," she says. In the middle panel she shows the school she now attends. "In the future, I would like to be a bird and live in freedom," says Mayass. (©2016 World Vision/photo by Jon Warren)

At the bottom of her picture, Marah, 12, drew water and a book open to a story. "'Once upon a time ...' that's my past story in Syria." It's represented by a dripping candle and a heart. The present she represents by a "sea of blood and a dark cloud." In the future she hopes the dark will fade. "I hope the future will light up the world," says Marah. (©2016 World Vision/photo by Jon Warren)

Abdul, 10, drew the car his father drove in Syria. "We were happy in our house in Syria. My father went to work by car. He was a builder man," says Abdul. In the center panel "there's a plane, rockets fall, and there are two sad people," he says. In the future, he's safe at home in Syria. "I love Syria more. I don't want to draw Lebanon," he says. (©2016 World Vision/photo by Jon Warren)

"It starts out that all is well. Small houses, a school, children. I remember the sounds of children on the playground, their smiles. Then the school is broken," says Huda, 50, a facilitator in the Child-Friendly Space.

"The stars are people in my past who have died," says Huda. "So many people lost. Now they are ... shining in my memory." In the present, "I am a bee. ... I must work hard for my hive ... my family, the children, my people." For the future: "I'm looking for peace, for freedom. I drew [the people] that way to show they are open-minded. To be among them will make me happy." (©2016 World Vision/photo by Jon Warren)

Mona, 12, says the bright light of Syria went out suddenly, like a candle (right panel). "I am in the center crying, because there were bombs and people died. In the future (left panel) I want to be an Arabic teacher and to be happy." (©2016 World Vision/photo by Jon Warren)

In his picture from the past, Yahia, 11, plays ball with friends by his house in Syria. There's beauty in Lebanon - trees and flowers - but no people in his drawing from the present. "I love Lebanon, but I love Syria more," he says. In the future, Yahia, a famous singer, holds a microphone and sings while others dance. (©2016 World Vision/photo by Jon Warren)

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Syrian refugee children use art to express pain and loss | World Vision

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When Faras, 11, draws a picture of his past in Syria, he sketches an idyllic landscape with a smiling sun, a rushing river, and a green field where he and his brother once cared for sheep. Habib, 9, instead uses a black crayon to outline a helicopter dropping bombs.