Large numbers of refugee kidnappings in Sinai occurred between 2009 and 2014. Refugees from Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea were transported to Sinai and held hostage by members of Bedouin tribes. Typically, the hostages were forced to give up phone numbers of relatives and were tortured with the relatives on the phone, in order to obtain ransoms in the range of $20,000–$40,000. If the families could not pay, the hostages were killed.[1][2][3][4] The Egypt–Israel barrier, designed to keep out African migrants, caused the Rashaida traffickers to lose income from transporting refugees to the border, so they started to concentrate on kidnappings.
In 2013, Physicians for Human Rights–Israel estimated that about 1,000 refugees were being held, and that in total about 7,000 refugees had been abused in Sinai hostage camps, resulting in more than 4,000 deaths. In 2014, Egyptian security forces fought unrelated insurgent networks committing terror attacks in the peninsula, and the kidnapping of refugees moved to Libya and elsewhere.
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