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NEGEV (Ma’an) -- Israeli authorities demolished several homes belonging to Bedouin Palestinians in the Negev and the city of Lod in central Israel on Wednesday.

Lod residents told Ma’an that bulldozers demolished two Bedouin houses in the area, belonging to the al-Naqeeb and al-Farajat families.

According to Atiyeh al-Assam, the mayor of the regional council of unrecognized Bedouin villages, Israeli forces demolished two additional houses in the Negev: one in the village of Wadi Ghwein, and another on the outskirts of the village of Kseifa belonging to resident Khalid al-Daghayma.

Bedouin member of the Israeli Knesset, Talab Abu Arar, slammed the demolitions, describing them as “ethnic cleansing,” and called the forcible evictions of the Bedouins a “crime against humanity.”
Approximately 160,000 Bedouins reside in villages not recognized by the state of Israel in the Negev alone, according to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), where they are denied basic services and infrastructure.

The Israeli government uses a variety of strategies to pressure Bedouins into relocating to government-planned urban centers, in contradiction with their semi-nomadic lifestyle, which necessitates access to open grazing land for herding camels and goats.

Meanwhile, demolitions are an almost daily occurrence for Bedouins in the occupied West Bank who largely reside in “Area C” -- areas under full Israeli civil and military control according to the Oslo Accords.

Over 70 percent of Bedouins in the West Bank are refugees, displaced from their original places of residence in what is now southern Israel during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), while the majority of Palestinians displaced due to the demolition of their homes in Area C reside in Bedouin communities.

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