Monday at dawn [September 30 2013] Israeli soldiers declared Khirbit Makhoul area, in the West Bank’s Northern Plains, a closed military zone. The Bedouin village was destroyed for the third time on September 19.Head of the Wadi Al-Maleh Village council, in the Jordan Valley, Aref Daraghma, stated that the soldiers declared the village a closed military zone after surrounding it.
He told the Palestinian News & Info Agency (WAFA) that dozens of soldiers were deployed around the devastated village in an attempt to prevent residents, international activists, and journalists from reaching it.
Ongoing Displacement
Israel does not recognize dozens of small villages, Bedouin tribes, in the Northern Plains areas of the West Bank, and near occupied East Jerusalem, as well as near Hebron and other areas.
With no services, no recognition from the occupation, those villages have been repeatedly demolished, and removed, and the residents are frequently displaced due to Israel’s ongoing violations.
Bedouin villages in the Negev are also subject to such frequent attacks and violations, as dozens of small villages have been uprooted and demolished, some tribes have been displaced and their shelters removed hundreds of times.
Hundreds of similar attacks targeted Bedouins in the Negev, who live in villages unrecognized by Israel, and are subject to frequent displacement and ongoing assaults.
Around 70,000 Arab Bedouin – whose presence in the Negev dates to the seventh century – live in 35 villages that either predate the establishment of the state of Israel in historic Palestine in 1948.
These villages are not recognized by Israel, and the inhabitants are considered trespassers. Basic services have been withheld from these villages, and thousands of houses have been demolished since 2011.
Palestinian Bedouins have faced decades of repression and forced removal by Israeli authorities because of this refusal to recognize their legitimate claim to continue to live on their ancestral land.
