From [HERE] Israel is to begin mass expulsions of African asylum seekers on Sunday, flying the first planeload of South Sudanese back to their unstable country with more expected to follow later in the week, a spokeswoman for the Population and Migration Authority said.

"We have about 150 so far (for Sunday's flight)," Sabine Hadad told AFP on Wednesday. "We want more planes (to go) during the week." On Tuesday, the authorities arrested 100 asylum seekers who arrived illegally, while another 300 people agreed to be repatriated voluntarily, she said, without saying which countries they were from.

She had no updated figures for Wednesday morning's raids. Since the current wave of arrests began at dawn on Sunday, 240 people have been detained for deportation, most of them South Sudanese.

Official figures show there are 60,000 Africans living in Israel illegally, most of them in run-down neighborhoods of south Tel Aviv.

Until last week, the estimated 1,500 South Sudanese living in Israel were protected from deportation by a policy which afforded them "temporary protection."

But last Thursday, a Jerusalem court overturned that long-standing policy, ruling that they were no longer at risk in their homeland, despite ongoing conflict within South Sudan as well as with Sudan.

Israeli daily Haaretz said on Wednesday that a delegation of South Sudanese immigration officials was expected in Israel this week to coordinate repatriation of their citizens.

The mass expulsion comes on the heels of rising racist attacks by Jews against Africans, with Jewish extremists carrying out anti-African pogroms in Tel Aviv, smashing African-run shops and property, chanting "Blacks out!"

Israel, which reportedly backed South Sudan through its 1983-2005 war with Khartoum, recognized the new nation and established full diplomatic relations with its government shortly after it declared independence in July last year.

Zionism, Israel's founding ideology, has long been accused of being a racist blueprint for the country, as it reinforces Israel's Jewish identity at the expense of indigenous Palestinians and other non-Jewish communities.

Israeli society is, thus, largely intolerant towards non-Jewish communities, with racism a norm.