Israeli soldiers and police forces conducted home demolitions Monday morning in the “unrecognized” village of Al-Sirr, located on the outskirts of Shoqeib as-Salam in the Naqab (Negev).
The attack targeted homes belonging to the Abu Jadou family and structures owned by the Al-Nassaira family, displacing residents in a community long denied legal recognition.
The demolitions come amid a prolonged freeze on the expansion of structural planning maps for Palestinian communities in the region, unchanged for over three years, despite mounting housing needs.
According to official data, demolitions in the Naqab surged by 400% in 2024 alone, marking a dramatic escalation in state-led displacement.
Israeli authorities continue to raze homes, commercial establishments, and industrial workshops in Palestinian towns under the pretext of lacking building permits, a justification widely condemned by rights organizations as discriminatory and systematically applied to suppress Palestinian urban growth.
Recent demolitions have been documented in Rahat, Tuba-Zangariyye, Jadeidi-Makr, Yarka, Zarazir, Akka (Acre), Nazareth, Umm al-Fahm, Shefa-Amr, Sakhnin, Ein Mahil, Jaffa, Kafr Qasim, Qalansawe, Kafr Yasif, Ar’ara, Lod, Hurfeish, Kafr Qara, and numerous other Arab localities across the Naqab.
In the Naqab region, tens of thousands of Indigenous Bedouin citizens live in villages that the Israeli state refuses to recognize.
These communities, numbering over 35 and home to approximately 90,000 people, are denied access to essential infrastructure, including electricity, water, sewage systems, and emergency services.
Despite their formal citizenship, Bedouin residents face systemic exclusion, land dispossession, and repeated demolitions under the pretext of “illegal construction.”
In 2024 alone, Israeli authorities demolished more than 4,000 structures in unrecognized Bedouin villages, citing infrastructure development and land regulation.
Villages such as Umm al-Hiran, Wadi al-Khalil, and Ras Jrabah have been targeted to make way for Jewish colonies like “Dror,” even though many Bedouin communities were forcibly relocated to these areas by the state in the 1950s.
The village of Al-Araqib, for example, has been demolished over 238 times as of March 2025. Yet, residents persist in rebuilding, asserting their ancestral connection to the land and resisting state efforts to erase their presence.
The root of the crisis lies in the Israeli state’s refusal to include Bedouin villages in its master planning schemes, even though most of these communities predate the establishment of Israel.
According to Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel – 35 unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Naqab either existed before 1948 or were established by military order in the early 1950s.
These villages are home to approximately 70,000 Arab Bedouin citizens, many of whom trace their lineage and land ownership back centuries.
The Bedouin presence in the Naqab is documented as far back as the 7th century. Following the establishment of Israel in historic Palestine in the year 1948, many communities were forcibly relocated or confined to restricted zones.
Today, the state continues to classify these villages as “unrecognized,” denying them legal status and excluding them from national development plans.
The so-called “Negev Development Plan,” launched in 2006 under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, was presented as a national strategy to “revitalize” southern Israel.
However, its implementation began with the demolition of homes in unrecognized Arab villages such as Al-Za’roura and Al-Boheira. Bulldozers, backed by police and special forces, razed homes belonging to families like the Abu Jouda and Farraj families, many of whom were preparing for weddings or living with young children.
Rights advocates, including Hussein Al-Rafai’a of the Regional Council of Unrecognized Villages and Atiyya Al-A’sam of the Association of Forty, condemned the demolitions as acts of institutional racism and displacement.
They argue that the development plan was never intended to benefit the Indigenous Bedouin population, but rather to clear land for Jewish colonies and military-industrial expansion.
Recent iterations of the plan, including a 2025 government announcement, allocate billions of shekels for infrastructure, agritech, and innovation hubs in Jewish-majority towns such as Netivot, Ofakim, and Ashkelon.
Yet, unrecognized Bedouin villages remain excluded from these planning schemes, receiving no funding, legal recognition, or basic services.
The plan also coincides with the relocation of Israeli military bases to the south, as part of a broader strategy to militarize and industrialize the region.
A 2021 Times of Israel report highlighted a NIS 500 million investment tied to this move, including the creation of a military-academic-industrial ecosystem, again, with no inclusion of Bedouin communities.
