Lebanon arrests 40 Palestinians bound for Germany

The Internal Security Forces Information Bureau Wednesday arrested Palestinian nationals as they were trying to join the asylum seekers wave to Germany.

"Forty Palestinians, including women, were detained while they were trying to flee [the country] through the northern port of Tripoli aboard a boat," ISF said in a statement carried by the state-run National News Agency.

A source told The Daily Star that the refugees were on a bus waiting for the owner of the boat to help them board the vessel when police detained them.

The owner of the boat was also arrested.

Investigations showed that the Palestinians were from the southern refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh and were trying to head to Germany.

The ISF and General Security have recorded several cases of boats ferrying asylum-seekers from Tripoli’s fishermen’s port in the past two months. The vessels used for the journey were no larger than 10 meters in width, similar to those used by local fishermen.

Many Syrian and Palestinian refugees have been escaping to Turkey in hopes of crossing the Aegean Sea to Greece, using it as a portal to reach the rest of Europe to seek asylum.

Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, has taken in by far the EU’s largest numbers of refugees amid the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.

The total number is expected to reach 800,000 this year – four times last year’s total – at a cost of about 10 billion euros ($11 billion) to the state.