v (AFP) - It is nap-time at Felizia's daycare centre, a squalid street-level flat in Tel Aviv where loud pop music drowns out the miserable cries of dozens of children and babies cooped up inside.

Run by a corpulent Ghanian woman, it is one of dozens of unlicensed establishments which have sprouted up across Israel's commercial capital offering an "affordable" child-minding service to thousands of illegal African immigrants who have to go to work.

Characterised by filth and squalor, they have been uniformly denounced by both rights groups and the media as "baby warehouses".

So far this year, five babies -- all only several months old -- have died in these so-called daycare centres.

And dozens more have died over the course of the years, either through negligence or a lack of adequate care, according to rights groups working to help African asylum seekers.

Although such child-minding facilities are not technically illegal and are often well-known locally, they are not supervised by the authorities.