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tel aviv | Ali and his sister started running as hard as they could toward the mountains near their village in Darfur when it was attacked and burned by militia forces — but his sister did not run fast enough, and was gunned down before Ali’s eyes.

Ali (not his real name) eventually made his way to Egypt and then Israel in search of refuge. Instead, he has spent nine months in an Israeli prison along with other Sudanese refugees who await a decision on their fate by Israeli and U.N. officials.

About 160 refugees have come to Israel in the past year, and most of them are being held in prisons or army bases. A law against infiltrators from enemy countries bars them from appealing their cases in court.

A few have been released to kibbutzim, where they are under house arrest.

“I came here for liberty and freedom in Israel, but unfortunately I found something else,” said Ali, 30, speaking by telephone from the Ma’asiyahu prison in Ramle. “I ask the Israeli government to help us, not to punish us, because we have already been punished enough. We need their help.”

Israeli officials say they’re doing what they can to expedite the process of interviewing the detainees and finding them homes in different countries in coordination with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Israel will not send the refugees back to Sudan, but the government is not letting them apply for asylum here because Sudan is considered an enemy country.

Some of the asylum-seekers are from the Darfur region, others from other parts of the African country. A civil war in Darfur has morphed into genocide of the region’s non-Arab peoples. Hundreds of thousands of people have died in the conflict, which has been led by government-sponsored militias recruited from Arab tribes who have murdered, raped and prevented humanitarian aide from reaching victims.

The Hotline for Migrant Workers and the Refugee Rights Clinic at Tel Aviv University recently filed a petition to the Supreme Court against the use of the infiltration law, which is being used to hold the asylum-seekers without due process.

The organizations also are asking for the cases of the asylum-seekers arrested by the army to be transferred to the Interior Ministry, where they can have access to judicial review within 24 hours. Lastly, the organizations say the refugees should be allowed to apply for asylum in Israel, just as refugees of other nationalities are permitted to do.

Noting the role of American Jews in pressuring the White House to confront the situation in Darfur, attorney Anat Ben-Dor of the Refugee Rights Clinic said she was hopeful American Jews might use their leverage to pressure the Israeli government. “We are lawyers and our work is in prisons and courts, but we do think some political pressure coming from Jews in the U.S. might tip the balance here and maybe change the attitudes of authorities,” she said.

There has been a significant increase in the number of Sudanese crossing into Israel since last December, when at least 28 Sudanese protesters were killed in Egypt when police opened fire to disperse a large crowd. The protest was held outside the UNHCR office in Cairo by Sudanese refugees demanding better conditions and treatment.

Following the demonstration, the Egyptian government announced it would deport 650 Sudanese arrested during the melée who did not have identification papers on them. Word of the planned expulsions further alarmed the refugee community.

Shevy Korzen, executive director of the Hotline for Migrant Workers, said she thinks part of the reason Israel has detained the Sudanese is out of fear that the Jewish state could be flooded by refugees.

“There are fears of a huge wave,” Korzen said, referring to the Sudanese asylum-seekers in Egypt. “Israel does not want refugees. Everyone is shocked about murders, but no one wants to take refugees.”

Korzen said she found it ironic that Israel was using the infiltrator law as a reason not to give the Sudanese a haven as refugees when it was Israel itself that promoted a section in the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 requiring countries to exempt refugees from measures they might normally take against enemy nationals.

Israel championed the provision, pointing to the fact that England had given refuge to Jews from Austria and Germany during World War II even though they were citizens of an enemy country.