Every year, thousands of African refugees, mostly from Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan, attempt the dangerous journey from their war-torn countries to Israel in search of economic prosperity and stability

Very few make it, and the results of the failed migration can be seen in the morgue of the central hospital in the Egyptian port town of El Arish. When a news crew visited there recently, all the refrigeration units were broken, leaving a biting stench of decaying corpses in the air, which staff members attempted in vain to cover up with chlorine-based cleaner and incense. On any given day, the morgue will be packed with the bodies of African refugees who died trying to make it to Israel. Hamdy Al-Azazy spends a lot of time here as head of the New Generation Foundation for Human Rights, which tries to help African refugees in Egypt. Every week, Al-Azazy combs the desert, searching for corpses, ensuring that they get a dignified burial. He has spent the past seven years helping the refugees. Many are enslaved and tortured and the women raped by the Bedouin tribes of the Sinai if they are unable to come up with large sums of money the Bedouin try to extort from them and their families, to smuggle the refugees across the border into Israel. As a result, many remain imprisoned in camps on the Sinai Peninsula. "They are chained and kept in camps in the open with no bathrooms and little water and food and treated worse than animals," Al-Azazy said. "Some of them are taken to Libya, but 80% of them are smuggled to Israel. Those who escape are shot by the Bedouins, and others who make it to the border are sometimes shot by the Egyptian authorities and transferred to hospitals before spending a year in different prisons in Sinai and deported back home." The refugees pay Bedouin tribes in the border area between Sudan and Egypt around $2,000 to be smuggled out. The smugglers then sell the refugees to the Sinai Bedouin, who blackmail the refugees and their families back home. They are chained and kept in camps in the open with no bathrooms and little water and food and treated worse than animals. Some of the refugees are forced into slave labor, often working marijuana fields that flourish all over Northern Sinai, Hamdy Al-Azazy says. Refugees who made it across the border into Israel have told harrowing accounts of rape, torture and slave labor. Women are especially vulnerable. One woman who made it to Israel was raped almost daily on a journey that took several months to get to Tel Aviv. "Every night, they took me separately, and they did whatever they wanted to my body," the Eritrean woman said. Al-Azazy hears stories like this all the time. "The women and men are kept in open areas. These Bedouins don't have any morals or conscience. One girl told me that three Bedouins had raped 14 girls in one night," he said. Interviews with refugees who have escaped the camps or been released suggest that mistreatment and even murder are commonplace in the Bedouin camps. Egypt's government and armed forces seem powerless to stop the Bedouin smugglers. Police units have been forced out of most areas in North Sinai after the revolution that swept longtime leader Hosni Mubarak from power. A military operation aimed at combating Islamist extremists in the area has done little to stop people trafficking in this lawless region that runs mostly on criminal activity, such as smuggling of goods into Gaza and drug trafficking.