There were more than 50,000 refugees living in Yemen at the end of 1996. About 45,000 were from Somalia. The remainder were Ethiopians, Eritreans, and Palestinians. A total of 7,137 Somali refugees arrived in Yemen in 1996, many by boat from Bossasso in northeast Somalia. Some were accommodated in the Al Gahin camp, which, by year's end, held 5,821 Somali refugees. UNHCR assisted the refugees living in Al Gahin. UNHCR provided limited assistance to another 23,000 Somali refugees not living in camps. Most were living in urban centers, such as Sana'a, Aden, and Ta'iz, although about 1,000 of them were living in rural areas. Another 15,500 Somalis with prima facie refugee claims assert that they are of Yemeni origin, but have not been granted Yemeni citizenship. They were part of a group of some 35,000 Somalis claiming to be of Yemeni origin who entered between 1992 and 1996. About 20,000 of that group have been granted Yemeni citizenship. The remainder have either been denied citizenship or their cases are still pending. UNHCR assisted 229 Somali refugees to repatriate to northeast Somalia in 1996. The 2,500 Eritrean refugees in Yemen live along the Red Sea coast. Their situation stabilized somewhat in 1996 as the governments of Yemen and Eritrea came closer to resolving their differences. During the year, 52 Ethiopian refugees voluntarily repatriated. This left 1,015 Ethiopian refugees in Yemen at year's end. Yemen also hosted about 6,000 Palestinian refugees. Local press reports in January 1996 indicated that 14 Egyptian "extremists" who had been living under the protection of tribal and Islamic groups were expelled from Yemen. They were not, however, turned over to the Egyptian authorities but, instead, were deported to the countries of their choice. In July 1996, the Yemeni interior minister said that Yemen had deported about 14,000 undocumented aliens in the past year. In making his remarks to the London magazine al-Wasat, the interior minister specifically said that the campaign to deport illegal aliens was not targeted at Somali refugees, adding somewhat cryptically that UNHCR "has understood this and apologized for what it said before."
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