Greece sent in police and bulldozers on Tuesday to knock down tents and relocate hundreds of migrants who had been stranded for months in a squalid makeshift camp on the border with Macedonia.

Several busloads of people, most of them families with children, left the sprawling expanse of tents at Idomeni to move to state-run centers farther south. Buses were lined up ready to take more, Reuters witnesses said.

By the latest count, at least 8,000 people were camped at Idomeni in difficult, overcrowded conditions with poor sanitation, ignoring previous calls by the government to leave.