Israeli soldiers and police officers invaded, on Thursday morning, the Palestinian Bedouin village of al-Arakib, in the Negev, and demolished it for the 145th consecutive time.
The families said the soldiers and police surrounded their village before invading it, and demolished the tents and sheds, rendering them homeless in the extreme heat of the Negev Desert.
It is worth mentioning that this demolition brings the number of times the Bedouin community was destroyed by Israel to 145; the last one before today’s demolition was carried out on April 15th 2019.
Like the 34 other Bedouin villages “unrecognized” by Israel, al-Araqib does not receive any services from the Israeli government and is constantly subjected to the threats of expulsion and home demolition.
These “unrecognized” villages were established in the Negev soon after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, following the creation of the state of Israel, when an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes and made refugees.
Many Bedouins were forcibly transferred to the village sites during the 17-year period when Palestinians inside Israel were governed under Israeli military law, which ended shortly before Israel’s military takeover of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in 1967.
Now, more than 60 years later, the Bedouin villages have yet to be legally recognized by Israel and live under constant threat of demolition and forcible removal.
