It's hard to shake off the image of them staring into space. On benches and dried-out grass in south Tel Aviv’s Levinsky Park, small rows of men and women sit in wide-eyed silence. They are in shock. Many of them don’t offer details of their journey into Israel: ‘It was terrible,’ they say, and then stop. Refugees from mostly South Sudan, Eritrea, Sudan and also the Ivory Coast and the Congo, they entered the country through the Sinai Desert’s border with Egypt. ‘There were bad things, very bad things,’ one South Sudanese woman ventures, looking at her solemn seven-year-old daughter: they crossed the border a few years ago, and the girl barely spoke for months afterward.