Israel demolishes village at the heart of Bedouin minority’s struggle over land

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli authorities on Thursday completed the demolition of a village at the heart of a yearslong struggle by members of the country’s Arab Bedouin minority against relocation plans.

Israel says the hundreds of villagers were squatting on state-owned land, and officials had offered them plots in a nearby Bedouin township. Residents of the village, Umm al-Hiran, accuse the authorities of forcibly displacing them so the land can be developed for Israel’s Jewish majority.

Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, celebrated the move, posting on X that there has been a 400% increase in the issuance of such demolition orders so far this year.

“Proud to lead a strong policy of demolishing illegal houses in the Negev!” he wrote.

Israeli bulldozers entered the 400-person village in the Negev Desert on Thursday and demolished the last building left standing – the mosque.

Residents had dismantled their makeshift homes earlier this week to avoid having to pay fees for the state to demolish them.

Videos shared by activists and the police showed an excavator clawing down the mosque, its dome collapsing in a heap on the ground.

Or Hanoch, an Israeli activist who witnessed the demolition, said drones and helicopters hovered overhead as seven police bulldozers demolished what remains of the village.

“After the mosque was demolished, the rest of the heavy machinery started re-destroying the rest of the houses, which were already demolished,” Hanoch said.

Three members of the village council were arrested early Thursday before the demolition began, said Nati Yefet, the spokesperson for the Regional Council for Unrecognized Villages in the Negev.

The council has accused Israel of clearing the land for the construction of a Jewish community.

“The destruction of Umm al-Hiran to make way for the settlement of Dror is part of a systematic population replacement program in the Negev,” it said. Four other Bedouin villages have been demolished this year as part of a larger plan to raze unrecognized villages and build new Jewish communities in their place, it said.

The council said that 14 villages in the area that are home to some 9,000 Bedouin are at risk of demolition.

Umm al-Hiran was founded in its current location in 1956, after the Israeli military relocated the village clan multiple times following the 1948 war that led to Israel’s creation.

Israel’s more than 200,000 Bedouin are the poorest members of the country’s Arab minority, which also includes Christian and Muslim urban communities.

Israel’s Arab population, which makes up roughly 20% of the country’s 10 million people, are citizens with the right to vote but often suffer discrimination and tend to identify with Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.