Around the gaping shaft of a disused mine, South African police Saturday waited to pounce on anyone trying to escape to the surface.

Their siege has gone on for weeks as they’ve tried to flush out hundreds of men accused of illegal mining in an abandoned gold mine, where they are now camped out near Stilfontein, in South Africa’s North West province. Officers have cut off the miners’ supply of water and food, guarded every known exit and pulled up or cut ropes used to ferry supplies underground, according to images distributed by police.

Now they wait for the bedraggled miners, who some South Africans fear are dying of hunger and thirst, to turn themselves in.

“We are not sending help to criminals. We are going to smoke them out,” a minister in the president’s office, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, said in a news conference Wednesday.

The tactics have ignited a debate about upholding human rights and efforts to fight crime.

— The New York Times